Dining room update.

First things first: to the lady who commented and said that Bradley’s hot…I know, right?? He’s also really nice, really funny and really smart. I’m a big fan of that guy. Especially when he does stuff like this and lets me put it on the internet for everyone to see:

Heh heh. What a guy.

Things are starting to cool down in our neck of the woods. We built our first fire of the season recently:

This year, we’re determined to use our wood-burning stove for heat 90% of the time. We had our oil boiler topped off last winter, but we hate using oil for heat. A few weekends ago, we had two cords of wood delivered and we spent two full days stacking wood. I didn’t take any photos of that because I had the flu and really just wanted to curl up and nap all day.

We know the living room is going to be insanely cold this winter — no insulation, remember? — and it’s the room we spend most of our time in. We won’t get around to insulating it this year, which means we’ll freeze our fannies off if we hang out in there too long.

Now that the dining room is fully insulated, complete with new door and new windows, it makes sense to move the couch and TV in there for the winter. For those of you keeping track at home, this is our third living-room-to-dining-room migration in 18 months. Sigh. Someday, the madness will end. But not today, peeps. Not. Today.

Before we move in, we want to paint the floors and put up trim to finish up the room. But before we can do that, we have to address some issues with our dining room floors.

The floors are old and weathered, but we love the way they look. What we don’t love is how much they bounce, creak and groan when you walk around. Bradley’s mom summed it up: “You could never sneak up on anyone in this house.” We’re pretty used to creaking wood floors from years of living in pre-war apartment buildings. It’s the bouncing that freaks us out.

The bounce in the center of the dining room was so bad that it felt like you were inside a bouncey castle. Or on a trampoline. OK, fine, we’re totally exaggerating, but it was pretty bad. Last winter, Bradley built a wall in the basement so we could store our firewood in one corner:

That wall happens to be right under the dining room, and as soon as it was in place the bouncing stopped. Now we just had to worry about the creaking.

In our case, the creaking was due to wobbly boards. The solution was to nail them down so they stop shifting around.

We used these special nails that have a corkscrew twist through the body. This helps keep nails from popping up and also makes it really hard to pull them out once they’re in place.

We started by snapping some chalk lines along every beam that runs under the flooring:

Finding the beams was easier than it sounds: the butt end of each board has to rest on top of a beam. So we snapped a line down the center of areas where a lot of butt ends met up. Pretty soon, we had a series of parallel lines at fairly regular intervals:

Then we just went in and bang 2 nails per board all the way down the line.

The nail heads are totally visible, but they form nice, straight lines down the length of the room. This is not going to be the right solution for every creaky floor. It would look pretty odd in a new house with shiny new floors. But it works for our old house because the floors are already distressed and rustic. Visible nail heads just adds to the charm.

We nailed down the floor boards in the hallway while we were at it:

And we’ll do the same in the living room once we’ve moved all the furniture out.

There were some crusty, rotten strips of wood in the doorway that connects the living room and dining room, so Bradley removed them and replaced them with new strips of wood:

The process was exactly the same as what we did in the guest bedroom close way back in May 2011. You can read all about that here.

While he took care of that, I put up all the switch plates and outlet covers:

It’s been hard to photograph the color of the walls accurately, but you can really see it now that the outlets are in place.

It’s starting to look finished, but we have a lot of small details to take care of before we’re done. Like installing our new doorbell:

We don’t have any good before pictures of our old doorbell because we ripped that sucker out and stomped on it, Office Space style. You can see it in this picture from earlier in the year:

It was a beige monstrosity straight out of 1975 and they didn’t even bother to center it. We replaced it with this bell that looks like a teeny-weeny version of something that might hang in a middle school classroom:

We centered it, of course. But we’re not 100% happy with it. We might paint it white so it’s not so shiny.

It looks fine during the day, but it’s hanging so close to the track lighting that it blinds us at night. A crisp white will help it blend in a bit and hopefully keep us from burning out our retinas every time we walk through the room.

We painting the floors this weekend, and we can’t wait to share that with you guys. We also have some more updates on what we’ve been up to for the past couple of weekends. Plus we have to share our plans for the laundry room, downstairs bathroom and kitchen. Stay tuned!

I’ll Tumble For Ya (DIY Compost Tumbler)

That was the official soundtrack to our Saturday because we spent it making a compost tumbler. (A sure sign of my internet nerdiness: I keep typing tumblr instead of tumbler. Boink.) We’ve been thinking about composting for a long time and decided to take the plunge.

A few weeks ago, we started researching different composting methods to figure out which would work best for our needs. Here’s our criteria:

• It has to be outside.
  We briefly considered worm composting, but decided against it because we couldn’t leave it outside in extreme heat or cold. We also read that composting can attract fruit flies and gnats. That’s fine with us — it’s part of the natural process — but we’d rather not have it happening in our basement.
• It has to be low-maintenance. 
  We’re busy people and our daily to-do list doesn’t need any additions. Turning compost with a shovel sounds like a chore, so we scratched bins off of our list.
• It has to be dog-proof.
  One of our dogs is a prissy princess and the other one is a total dog. Margot loves to eat garbage and roll around in smelly stuff. The pile and pit methods are out.
• It has to be low-profile.
  We have big plans for our yard, and they don’t include an eyesore of a compost container sitting in a corner. We want something small and low-key so we can hide it behind planter boxes or bushes.

Based on our needs, we decided to go with a tumbler. It’s kept outside, keeps vermin and dogs out, and only needs to be flipped once or twice a week. Plus it’s small enough that we’ll be able to hide it when we start gussying up the yard.

When we Googled, we found 2 basic kinds of tumblers. One is what we’ve been calling an R2D2 style tumbler (again with the nerdiness) and the other is a pig-roast style rotator. We went with the R2D2 tumbler because it seems easier to flip.

Here’s the plan we came up with:

It’s nothing unique. Plenty of websites have the same basic plan for tumblers. Our favorite was this plan from Boys’ Life. We took the principles from their plan and made our own. One big difference: ours is smaller. We also added in a key feature that we wanted: we can easily remove our bin and move it where we need it. That way we don’t have to drag the entire frame everywhere. And we don’t have to dump our compost and carry it where we need it.

One we had a plan, we gathered supplies. There’s a place in Brooklyn that recycles, cleans and sells food-grade bins. Bradley picked up two 40-gallon bins for $20 each:

Why two? Because our friend Jhane came over to make a tumbler for her backyard, too:

Jhane wanted a 101 on using power tools so she can start building things on her own. She made her tumbler while Bradley supervised to make sure she didn’t chop off a finger or anything. She didn’t. And she made her own tumbler with minimal help. Oh, and Jhane also cut most of the wood for our tumbler so she could get as much practice as possible. Awesome, right?

So when we went to Lowe’s to pick up our supplies, we got enough for 2 tumblers and split the cost.

Here’s the materials list for two tumblers:

• Two 40-gallon recycled food-grade bins
• One 12-pack of 6″ Timberlok screws
• One pound box of 1.25″ deck screws
• Four T-shaped brackets
• Twelve 1.5″ lags
• Two 3/4″ galvanized pipes
• Two 3/4″ galvanized pipe caps
• Pressure treated wood
  • One 2x10x8
  • One 2x4x8
  • One 2x6x8

Total cost for two tumblers: $140
Cost for one tumbler: $70

Bradley and Jhane measured and cut the wood for the legs inside the garage:

I went outside to drill air holes in the bins:

We marked the bins using orange chalk so the holes weren’t all over the place.

We’re anal like that.

By the time I finished, the carpentry crew had two sets of legs ready to go. Each leg consists of two pieces:

Flash forward a bit and this is what they’ll look like:

Here’s how we put them together. Each leg is held together using a T-shaped bracket, deck screws and lags:

Plus two 6″ long screws per leg:

These puppies were kind of a splurge. The 12-pack ran us a little over $12. But they’re worth every cent. The legs are crazy sturdy.

We put the two pieces of wood together and lined them up so they’re centered. Then we laid a T bracket on top and traced the outline:

Then we used a router to carve out the shape of the T bracket:

That way it can sit in there nice and flush with the wood:

That whole routing thing, by the way, is a totally skippable step. It doesn’t really matter if the bracket is flush with the wood. I wasn’t kidding when I said we were anal. Plus it gave Jhane a chance to learn how to use a router.

We added a deck screws and lags through the T bracket:

The legs were still a little wobbly at this point, so we added a 6″ screw to each side:

And finally, we had sturdy legs:

Here’s Bradley doing his best R2D2 impersonation, beeps and all:

Next up, we drilled a big hole through each leg for the pipe to go through. We used a 1.25″ spade drill bit for that.

Margot watched him intently:

Not only does she love to eat and roll in garbage, she loves to eat and roll in wood shavings. We had to keep shooing her out so she wouldn’t eat treated lumber shavings. Weirdo!

After the hole was drilled, we used a circular saw to make two cuts from the top of the leg to the hole:

This is how it looked when we finished:

It’s basically like a big U. The pipe will sit in the rounded part at the bottom. We didn’t like how clunky it looked so we decided to shave off two triangles at the top. Again, anal, and totally optional.

Here’s how the legs looked with a 23″ piece of wood between them and the pipe in place:

The wood piece in between the legs is what holds the two sides together, so we wanted it to be really sturdy. We used two 6″ screws to hold them in place:

We ended up having to use 6″ lags for Jhane’s tumbler because we ran out of 6″ screws, but they were even more heavy duty. The legs on her tumblers will never wobble.

Bradley tested the weight limits on our tumbler frame:

It held just find with a 152-pound man swinging on it, so we should be fine. Next, we drilled holes in the bin to thread the pipe through:

We used the spade bit again:

The placement of the hole will depend on the height of the container. Our containers are 32″ tall so we placed our hole at the halfway point of 16″. We drilled one hole on each side:

Then we put the pipe through:

And we put the container on the stand:

We put a galvanized pipe cap on each end of the pipe. Then we put the lid back on the container. Ta-da! It’s a tumbler. We had to test it’s spinning ability:

We shouted “WHEEL. OF. FORTUUUUUNE!” every time we gave it a whirl. And we did Boy George proud with our rendition of “I’ll tumble for ya!” I don’t think the neighbors appreciated it, but we were entertained.

Here’s how the tumbler looks when it’s hanging out on it’s stand, waiting for a spin:

And here’s how it looks when we remove it from its stand and take it to whatever part of the yard needs a little dirt:

Jhane’s tumbler looks exactly the same except her bin doesn’t have a little white spot in the middle of the lid. Her family plans on painting theirs to look like R2D2. Beep boop! Super cute. We’ll snag some pics when it gets a paint job.

The entire project took about 2.5 hours from start to finish. At $70 a pop, it was a bit more than we were planning on spending. We thought each tumbler would end up costing about 50 beans. The reason for the extra cost? We splurged on pressure treated wood instead of just regular lumber.

We could have gotten regular wood and painted it, but it would have involved more work and more maintenance. We didn’t want to have to repaint the stand every year or two. With pressure treated lumber, we can pretty much leave it alone and it’ll last indefinitely.

Coming up tomorrow: we made our own countertop compost pail. Squee! Stay tuned.

Happy birthday, Jabba the Mutt!

Hey peeps! It’s our favorite pug’s birthday — or at least the birthday we made up for her. We like to celebrate it on St Patty’s Day because Jabba looooves beer. Anyway, we thought we’d do a special post all about our special pup on her 6th birthday. (We don’t really know how old she is so she turns 6 every year.)

We found Jabba through a rescue group in NYC in May 2007. At the time, we weren’t sure whether we wanted to adopt a dog, so we decided to give fostering a try. I had weeks of downtime in between freelance gigs that summer, so the timing was perfect. On May 12th, 2007, we picked up this sad little pooch:

We named her Jabba the Mutt because those fabulous neckrolls reminded us of that other Jabba..

She pretty much hid under a chair for a few days. Oh, did we mention we decided to foster two dogs at the same time?

That’s Fester. We named him after Uncle Fester from the Addams Family. And because he smelled awful when we got him. His tongue pokes out of his mouth all the time. Even when he’s asleep.

A super-nice couple saw that photo on Petfinder and decided to give Fester a permanent home. He still lives in Brooklyn, and the last time I saw him, he looked (and smelled) great. His parents decided to keep the name Fester regardless.

Jabba and Fester’s old lives didn’t seem very happy. Both dogs showed up with serious medical conditions. Fester had a gnarly ear infection that had been neglected for so long that his ear lost all its fur and looked like elephant skin. Jabba had bladder stones that had to be surgically removed. She was in pain pretty much all the time. And it shows in all of her photos from that summer.

We spent May and June taking the dogs from Brooklyn to Harlem on the subway for visits with the rescue group’s vet. At the end of June, Fester’s ear cleared up and he went home with his new family. Jabba had 2 surgeries, and pulled through just fine. And then this happened:

She went from looking miserable all the time to looking pretty happy.

At this point, Jabba and I were pretty much inseparable. It was a slow summer for work, so we hung out in Brooklyn all day, every day. I can tell you pretty much every dog-friendly establishment in Park Slope because we hit em all. We made it official and adopted her. And she’s had it pretty good ever since.

Here’s Jabba on a beach in Maine:

Waiting for pizza in Philadelphia:

At Bradley’s boss’s cabin in north Pennsylvania:

Chowing down on freshly-picked apples at Bradley’s aunt & uncle’s place in Minnesota:

Keeping Austin weird:

Barking at cows at Bradley’s aunt & uncle’s ranch in Texas:

They were terrified. Really.

It isn’t all fun and travels, though. Jabba’s been going to work with Bradley for years. Here she is in the metal shop:

She’s also done a little modeling for his company’s website:

Source

All that hard work makes a girl hungry:

We’re really lucky to have found a dog who happily puts up with our shenanigans:

And is a positive role model for other dogs:

But mostly we’re just glad we found a dog who loves us every bit as much as we love her:

Happy birthday, Jabba the Mutt. May you turn 6 every year for many more years!

Our 2-Hour $0 Salvaged Materials Bed

In our previous Brooklyn lives, we lived in an apartment that was just a wee bit over 500 square feet. We didn’t have much storage. Or, to be more accurate, we didn’t have a single closet in the entire place. Seriously. No closets. All we had were 3 wall-mounted cabinets in the kitchen and a little under-the-sink storage. It’s pretty amazing what can pass as an apartment in NYC.

We had to get a little creative without storage solutions, so one of the first purchases we made after moving in was the IKEA Sultan Alsarp:

Source

The slatted base lifts up to give a whole lot of storage space underneath. Smart! We also loved the fact that the bed is slip-covered. The white fabric you see on the base is actually velcroed on. We loved how we could just slip it right off and wash it whenever we felt like it. ….until we actually washed it and it shrank and fell apart.

Reading instructions: we suck at it.

Al’s skirt didn’t last through one wash cycle. We raised our gnarled fists to the sky and cursed IKEA, but still loved the bed. So we marched on down to our local IKEA and asked where we could find slipcovers for old Al. And that’s when FAIL #2 happened: Al doesn’t have replacement slipcovers.

One slipcover comes with the bed, and that’s the only slipcover you can have. For the rest. of. your. life. There was much gnashing of teeth and wrenching of fists, and in the end we vowed never to shop at IKEA again. (That didn’t last long.) But, because we hadn’t been pooped on enough yet, FAIL #3 happened a few days later:

Under Al’s slipcovered skirt is a foam padding. We were planning on DIYing a slipcover to go over it, but someone decided to shred the padding instead:

The foam padding had been chewed on, clawed at and torn off. And the evidence of little bits of yellow foam found in his whiskers both proved his guilt and the dog’s innocence. After that incident, our plans to sew a slipcover got tossed out the window.

We were going to reveneer the entire bed and make it super fancy, but when we took a close look at the bed, we discovered that it was literally coming apart at the joints. Another FAIL. We’ve lost count of our FAILs at this point.

Morale has been kinda low ’round these parts. With the crappy weather and the never-ending cabinet project, we’ve been moving pretty slowly. So, to stir things up a bit, we did a freestyle project. One that involved no planning, no over-thinking, and — best of all — no money. We woke up on Saturday and decided we had one day to build our bed with whatever we could find. It took us 2 hours.

We started by gathering materials.

We salvaged the slatted frame from our IKEA bed. It’s in perfect condition and made from a very durable steel. We also found these five blocks of wood in our garage:

Those are leftover pieces from a big oak beam. The big ones are 9″ cubes and the smaller one in the center is about 4″ across. They’ve been stained and sitting around for a long time, and we thought they would be perfect legs for our new bed.

Those are the only 2 elements of our super modern / minimalist bed: the slatted frame and the beam legs. Plus a few screws to hold it all together. Really. That’s it.

With our materials ready to go, we set up our table saw with a dado blade:

The kerf of a standard blade is 1/8″. Kerf is, oddly enough, not a word that Bradley made up to mess with my head. (I had to take it to The Googles.) It means the width of the saw cut. With a dado blade, you can change the kerf to whatever you need. Our saw has a maximum kerf of 3/4″, so that’s what we set it to. Here’s some kerfing in action:

The stink-face is an absolute mandatory when using a table saw.

Basically, using a dado blade lets you take out strips instead of fine lines.

In no time, our blocks had matching grooves:

Next step: sanding. This is what the blocks looked like after a quick run with a belt sander:

Ignore the nosy dog in the background.

Our initial plan was to stain or paint the blocks. But covering up this gorgeous wood felt wrong:

We loved the distressed look. How some parts have a blackened pattern and others are completely bare. We decided to roll with it and see how the bed looked with naked legs. If we hated how it turned out, we could always paint them later.

The assembly took about 15 minutes. First, we put the legs in place:

The four big blocks are the legs, and the small block in the middle is support for the middle of the bed. We ran out of felt furniture pads, so we improvised with some extra rug pads we had lying around:

We cut those into 8″ squares and slipped them under the legs that sit on on wood floors. That way they won’t scratch up the paint. After that, we plopped the frame right on top:

And, finally, we screwed the frame to the legs to hold everything together:

We don’t want the screw head sticking up at all, but we didn’t have a countersink bit with us. We had to improvise. Bradley drilled his pilot hole with a small drill bit. Then he used a much bigger drill bit to make a countersink.

The trick is to gently drill away a layer without going all the way through the hole. That way you end up with a cone-shaped hole for the screw to sit in:

See how the hole is wider at the top and smaller at the bottom? That’s how you get a screw to sit flush against a surface instead of sitting on top of the surface:

Bradley put 2 long screws into each leg. We picked up the bed and moved it across to room to make sure it was sturdy, and it was. So we vacuumed the rug, moved the bed back and dropped the mattress on top. Here’s what our bed looks like now:

You can’t see the frame at all from a normal vantage point, so the bed looks like it’s floating on beams. From underneath, you can see the slatted frame:

We’re on the hunt for deep teal bedding right now. With the right duvet, the frame shouldn’t be visible at all. And we’re hoping the natural wood legs will really pop against a bold color. Check out that streaked wood:

We love the way those legs look against the jute rug.

Our next big task is to make bedside tables. Right now, we’re using some trays to keep our lamps and bedside messes contained.

We picked up those lamps at Target a few weeks ago. We wanted something simple and neutral enough to work in any room. That way we can move these to the living room later if we want. We’re just starting to get a feel for the kind of textures and colors we want in this room, so we might get some other lamps for this space down the line. Right now, we’re digging ‘em.

We’re also digging the white dresser in the funky angled corner:

We’re not sure if we ever shared after pictures of that sucker in use. So far, the paint hasn’t chipped a bit even with daily use. The secret is all in the polyurethane — two to three coats, sand in between!

There you have it. We made a bed in 2 hours. It felt so good to sleep in a “real” bed last night. Just having the mattress up off the floor really helps make the room look more finished. Our guest bedroom is finally starting to come together. We still need to:

• Get some new bedding.
• Build a couple of night stands.
• Do a quickie IKEA-hack console table.
• Hang some art.
• Get some color in there, pronto. Love neutrals and all, but this room is pretty boh-ring without color.

We’ll be back soon with updates on the never-ending cabinet and a couple of other small projects. Stay tuned!

One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Table

Or office desk, rather. Take a look at what Bradley worked on yesterday:

That’s our new office desk. It’s over 8-feet wide and has plenty of room for both of us to sit side-by-side. The desk top was actually a counter that Bradley’s company started creating but then abandoned to work on something else. It was wrapped in furniture blankets and exiled to the basement until a few months ago, when Bradley’s boss did some spring cleaning. He didn’t want to throw out the counter, but also didn’t want to keep it. So we offered to take it off his hands.

It looks like wood, but it’s actually plywood covered with a 1/4″ spalted maple veneer.

That crazy pattern — spalting — is caused by fungus. Basically the tree died and rotted naturally. And then it was reborn as a fancy veneer.

You can see some little holes throughout the table top:

Those were made by worms and bugs.

Here’s how Bradley took an unfinished counter and turned it into a desk. First, he had to veneer the sides because they were unfinished.

He attached a thin strip of veneer to the table using heavy-duty wood glue. He taped the veneer to the desktop to make sure it dried in perfect position. The wood strip was both longer and taller than it needed to be. You can see it sticking up along the edge of the table:

The next step was to shave off the excess wood and get a nice, smooth edge. Bradley used a router for that:

After that, it just was a matter of attaching the legs:

We stayed in Brooklyn for an extra day so Bradley could weld a set of 3 legs for the desk. (They haven’t moved the metal shop out to Pennsylvania yet, so that’s where all the welding happens.) He used 1.5″ angled steel for the box part and a piece of steel for the “wings” that connect to the wood.

Instead of using chemicals to color the steel, we decided to leave it as is.

We liked how the edges were a shinier grey and the rest of the was a more dull black. Bradley gave the legs a clear coat of varnish:

Then we carried it up to the office so he could assemble the legs:

He put a couple of felt furniture pads on each leg to keep them from scratching up the painted floor:

Then we flipped it and pushed it against the wall:

Ta-da!

We brought up one of our zebrawood chairs to try out the desk. Bradley mock typed for me:

Those chairs are actually for our (currently nonexistent) dining room table, and we’re not really sure if they’re working with the table.

Both wood grains are so unique that we were worried they would fight for attention. The spalted maple is much quieter than the super obnoxiously loud zebrawood chairs. So we’re considering using these as our office chairs. They’re much more comfortable than they look — I promise.

After setting up the desk, we got super geeked about how finished the room is looking. Sure, we still have to putting up and painting the trim, but — holy crap! — we have furniture in there. Finally! With our spending freeze officially over, we decided to go shopping for office accessories.

Here’s how our desk looks today:

Finding those two lamps at Target was nothing short of a Christma-Hanu-Rama-Kwanzaa miracle. Bradley and I do not agree on lamps. We’ve been vetoing one another’s lamp choices for months now. He thinks my picks are too girly-grandma-chic. I think his picks are too boring. But these puppies, we both agreed on right away:

They’re a good mix of vintage and classic and modern and industrial. And the oil-rubbed bronze fits right in with the black floors, doorways and desk legs. We snagged two of those for $30 a pop.

We also picked up this big apothecary jar:

Since I work from home a lot, I’ll be spending a lot of time in the office. Which means my four-legged friends will be spending a lot of time in the office, too. So we’re using the apothecary jar to stash dog treats in. Margot’s obsessed with it:

She keeps sneaking off into the office to stare at the jar.

We’re thinking about moving it closer to the middle of the desk just in case she gets tempted to climb up there. (She jumped up on the coffee table and ate an entire bag of treats a few days ago. Total brat!) We also picked up this cute ramekin to use as a water bowl for the pups:

We keep a water bowl in the kitchen, which is right under the office. One of our dogs is no spring chicken, and walking up and down stairs is getting harder for her. So we decided to put a water bowl upstairs so she doesn’t have to go far.

The varnish that we used on the desk legs has a really strong fresh paint smell. It’s going to take a few days to fade out. In the meantime, we’ve picked up a diffuser to help de-stink the office.

We liked the cute printed bottle, and the lemongrass smell is so fresh and so clean-clean. We liked it so much that we picked up another one of these for the guest bedroom. We also got couple of letter trays to keep our paper messes under control. His:

And hers:

A set of 3 magazine boxes helps divide the desk in half. The boxes and the trays were on sale for $4 each. Not bad! We also got a small waste basket to sit under the desk:

We liked how plain and simple the little metal bin is. What we don’t like: those cords in the background. Once we have our laptops and phones in the office, there are going to be even more cords under the desk. We’re working on a solution for that and we’ll share it soon. One more thing we’re working on:

We need to find a rug that fits the room. This grey IKEA rug used to feel so massive in our Brooklyn apartment. Now it looks tiny. We might use it for the laundry room later on, but we’ll leave it in the office until we find something that fits better. For now, it’s a good perch for Margot to keep an eye on that treat jar:

Still there. Good.

Here’s what’s left to work on in the office before we can call it officially done:

• Install shelves in the closet
• Finish putting up trim (in the closet and along the brick wall)
• Paint the trim
• Install bookshelf (or bookshelves?)

We’ll also eventually put in a dimmer for the recessed lighting because it’s too bright otherwise. But there’s no rush on that.

Oh, hey, remember when the office used to look like this?

Every now and then I like to dig up the before pictures to make the “work in progress” pictures look even fancier:

We’ve been working hard to cross everything off of our November / December To-Do list, and we’re getting close. We’ll be back with some more updates — including one biiiiig project — soon. Stay tuned!

Moving into the Guest Bedroom

We know we’re totally late on the whole Thanksgiving weekends update, but better late than never. We decided to have a low key, low pressure Thanksgiving. That’s code for “We were too lazy to cook a turkey.” We roasted a chicken instead. And the rest of our meal was made from stuff we had lying around the house.

Squash, mashed potatoes, green beans and roast chicken. And ice cream for dessert. Not bad for a very-last-minute feast. We even roasted a dog-friendly version of our meal for Jabba:

I tried to grab a picture of it but by the time I ran back with my camera, she’d already scarfed it down. I caught Smokey mid-scarf:

Canned cat food of the filet minon variety. He horked it down in a matter of seconds. Side note: we can’t wait to rip up that fugly linoleum. We’ve tried everything — even bleach — and it still looks dirty.

We decided to take Thanksgiving day completely off. The rest of our four-day weekend was spent wrapping up the guest bedroom. We gave the French doors a coat of polyurethane, removed the plastic film from the windows, and installed the custom door handles. Then we gave the trim 2 coats of black paint to match the floors and doors. After that, it was just a matter of vacuuming, mopping and moving in.

Here’s how the doors looked before:

And after:

View from the hallway:

We love how much light the hallway gets through the guest bedroom windows. And we’re still smitten with our DIY door handles. We were worried that the black-on-black would look flat, but the pop of texture really helps add some dimension to the doors:

View from the inside looking out into the hallway:

The closet doors are back up:

And, for the first time since April, we have a fully functioning closet:

It feels so luxurious not having to live out of cardboard wardrobe boxes. But even more than that, we’re thrilled to have a closet with doors. Our apartment in Brooklyn didn’t have any closets at all, so we installed an open closet system in the bedroom. Everything was always on display, which made for some awkward times when we had company over. Overflowing hampers happen.

Right now, we have 3 things in the room: a mattress, a rug and a chair. The mattress is on the floor, college student style:

We thought about gussying up the bed. Getting rid of the white duvet that we throw on the bed for extra warmth. Fluffing the pillows. Crisping up the linen. And then we realized, the mattress is on the frikkin’ floor. What’s the point of pretending we’re fancy? We like to keep it real:

We installed a ceiling fan a couple of weekends ago:

We’re not huge fans of fans, but we need a couple in our house. The guest bedroom is directly above the dining room, which is where our wood-burning stove is located. Having ceiling fans in the dining room and the guest bedroom will help circulate heat throughout the house.

As far as looks go, fans usual fall somewhere between bland and revolting. Anything even remotely attractive is way, waaaay out of our price range. So we chose fans that are really simple and plain in hopes that they won’t be too noticeable:

The chair is another piece from Bradley’s company. We snagged 6 of these puppies back in June — two with arm rests and four without. They’ll eventually end up in the dining room.

If you look closely along the bottom edge of the trim behind the chair, you can see that we need some touchup work on the floor paint. Apparently we didn’t get close enough to the wall in this part of the room. We’ll fix that when we paint the floors downstairs.

We also have to do a little touchup on the French doors:

Keepin’ it real.

We picked up a radiator pipe that let us move our tall, skinny radiator a few inches further from the curtain:

We were planning on making boxes for all of the radiators in our house so that they’re not total eyesores. But this one is so close to the window that we might just paint it and leave it exposed.

If we do leave it exposed, we’ll need to touch up some paint on the floor:

The other radiator — the short, wide one we removed — was super heavy and dented the floor a bit. We’ll also need to fix the big, gaping hole that the pipe pokes up from. You can see right down into the dining room through it:

We’re going to find or make some sort of cap to conceal that. And, finally, we’ll need to get a handle for the radiator valve:

It had one but it was so rusted that it broke when we removed the radiator. At the time, we played it off like we had the strength of The Hulk. It’s all fun and games till you realize you can’t find a replacement that’s the right size.

We’ll be back tomorrow with more updates on what we’ve been up to. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thanks for all the kind words about Margot. We’re completely smitten with this special dog, and we’re thrilled to have her join our family. Now if only we could get this potty-training business down…

Our latest DIY project: Margot Tenenbaum.

Hey folks! We’re going to start this post off by apologizing for being M.I.A. We’re long overdue for an update on the renovation, and we have so much to share. We’re living in an actual bedroom now! With an actual closet!! So what if our mattress is on the floor — it feels like we’re living in luxury after sleeping in the freezing dining room for the past 7 months.

The reason we’re so behind on our updates:

That’s Margot Tenenbaum. We named her after a character in one of our favorite Wes Anderson movies, The Royal Tenenbaums:

Source

Heavy eyeliner. Brown fur coat. They could be twins.

A few weekends ago, we decided to start volunteering at our local animal shelter. They’re pretty understaffed and they don’t get much funding. We thought we could help out by walking dogs a couple of hours a month. Before we headed over to fill out the paperwork, we made a pact that we would absolutely positively not be adopting any of the dogs. Nope. Wasn’t gonna happen. Just walking ‘em. No attachments.

And then she looked at me with those big brown peepers and I crumbled.

Bradley held his ground and refused to take her home. We’re renovating a house, we spend 2 days a week in Brooklyn, we do 3 hour drives. A new dog requires a lot of time. It’s a serious responsibility. Deep down, I knew he was right and we didn’t adopt her. He cracked a few days later.

7 days after we first met Margot, we took Jabba to the shelter and let them meet. The next thing you know, we’re riding home with one more dog than we arrived with.

We learned that she’s one or two years old and is a beagle mix. She was found as a stray in early October and brought to the shelter by Animal Control. Someone adopted her in November and then returned her a couple of weeks later because they weren’t ready for the commitment. She’s completely untrained and she’s not housebroken. And she shows signs of abuse and neglect.

She’s also incredibly smart. She learned “sit” and her name in the matter of hours. She’s making some serious headway on the whole potty training issue. And, even though she’s a little skittish and nervous, we think she’s starting to realize that we’re not going to take her back to the shelter. She’s starting to bond with us. Snuggling helps:

There’s been a lot of that:

Jabba’s doing her part to teach Margot the ins and outs of life in our family:

Put on a sweater? Check. Sit down? Check. Look cute? Check. Nice job, ladies.

Now that Margot’s been with us for a few days, we’ve got our schedules back to normal. Or as normal as they can be when we have to take turns tethering a dog to our belts. We’re finally getting into the groove of things, and we’ll be back to updating like normal starting tonight. Stay tuned, peeps. We’re back!

Insulation blows.

We kicked off our Halloween weekend with a good ol’ fashioned panic attack. Why? Because this happened:

Ohhh, the horror!! How are we going to survive winter with an uninsulated attic?

OK, it’s not completely uninsulated. But it might as well be. There are only 4 inches of the fluffy stuff upstairs. That’s an R-value of approximately 9. Or basically nothing. With snow falling and temperatures dropping, we decided it was time to stop fighting the inevitable. We needed to insulate.

Once we insulate the attic, we won’t be able to use it for storage anymore, so we had to make sure and completely empty the attic. We also won’t be able to walk around the attic  anymore because it would crush the insulation. We had to figure out a way to access the wires and other stuff we might need someday. And, finally, we needed a way to insulate the entrance to the attic:

We started by building a ledge to keep the insulation contained:

Bradley showed me how to install baffles along the edge of the attic:

I took over that job while Bradley built the catwalk:

The catwalk is basically an elevated trail that we can crawl along to access anything we might need without disturbing the insulation.

Here’s how we sealed up the entrance:

We stacked two sheets of 4″ foam right on top of the ledge. That gives us an R-value of 20. The staircase leading up to the attic will also act as an air pocket and hopefully help retain some of our heat downstairs.

While we were working, we heard a rustling noise in the corner. And then a squirrel popped out out of the old insulation:

He took a few steps towards us and just stood there. But something was off. The squirrel seemed…drunk? He was teetering and his eyes were all droopy. Before we could figure out what was happening, he climbed back into the insulation and hid under the floor boards.

Bradley checked out the situation and it seemed like our new squirrel friend was napping. We gave him a few gentle prods with the end of a broomstick and he refused to budge. So we grabbed a hammer and pried the floor boards up to see if we could scare him out:

And that’s when we realized our squirrel was actually not napping, but dying. Rapidly. We got him out just in the nick of time. Poor little guy. We actually feel really lucky that he came out and warned us rather than just dying quietly under the floorboards. That could have been really gross and smelly.

On a less sad note, here’s how the baffles looked when finished:

After that, we used Great Stuff to seal up the cracks between the floor and the ledge:

Next up: insulating!

Before we rented the insulation blower, we measured out the square footage of our attic — it’s 950 square feet. Then we went to Home Depot to buy our insulation and pick up the blower. The rental desk employee helped us figure out how much insulation we would need to add another 12 inches to our attic. It would cost us $750. Not bad! Unfortunately the blower was checked out by someone else, so we went to Lowe’s instead.

This is where our whole squirrel-died-Home-Depot-was-a-bust day turned around. Lowe’s had a blower available. They also had a different brand of insulation that was formaldehyde-free. That brand ended up being waaaaay cheaper than the brand Home Depot carried. Adding 12 inches to our attic would cost us only $435 at Lowe’s! That’s $315 cheaper. Whee! We love saving moolah!

The only catch with Lowe’s was that we had to buy a minimum of 20 bags to get the blower for free. We only needed 15 bags to add 12 inches, so the other 5 bags would be extra R-value. We loaded up and drove home.

We had a 100-foot hose to work with, so we didn’t even have to carry the insulation upstairs. We just ran the hose along the banister and up the stairs.

The attic is dark and creepy and smelly, so I volunteered to load the machine while Bradley sprayed. I was a little worried that I’d somehow hurt myself. Maybe the machine would eat up my fingers. Maybe my sleeve would catch on a gear, and I’d get swallowed up.

Every project starts with me wondering if I’m going to fall into a machine and get eaten. It’s totally irrational. Especially when the blades are covered with an inch of soft rubber. So, I flipped the switch and let ‘er rip.

I fed the machine with a quarter block of insulation at a time. The blades fluffed up the insulation and blew them up to the attic where Bradley sprayed it in soft piles:

It looked like a winter wonderland up there.

The next step was to carefully clear the catwalk so we knew where it was:

Bradley used a small broom to gently push insulation off and to the sides. Here’s how it looked when we finished:

We started out with 4 inches of insulation and an R-value of 9. We ended up adding 16-20 inches. We’re not sure what the R-value is now, but it’s over 44. The recommended amount for our area is 38, so we’re geeked. And we can feel the difference already. The second floor used to be so cold, we couldn’t hang out there for long unless we were working. Now? Nice and toasty.

The whole process took us about 6 or 7 hours. It was one of the easiest, most mindless jobs we’ve done around the house. The hardest part was not getting bored to death. Even if you’re not handy, you can totally insulate your attic in a day. Best part: you’ll save a ton of dough. Check out our budget breakdown.

What we spent
20 bags of insulation = $580
Blower rental = $0

Grand total = $580 for more than R-44.

Cost of buying R-38 insulation at Home Depot = $750
We saved $170 by going across the street.

Cost of having Lowe’s install R-38 = $1,881
We saved $1,301 by doing it ourselves.

—

What we learned:

• Shop around.
  We got lucky that Home Depot didn’t have a blower available so we had to go to Lowe’s. We saved a ton of money. Check both places before you rent!
• Prep your attic the day before you rent your blower.
  On Saturday, we cleaned our attic, built the ledge and catwalk, and went to Lowe’s to pick up the insulation and blower. On Sunday, we insulated for 6 hours straight, then took the blower back.
  
• You will feel scratchy all over.
  It’s unavoidable. Wear long sleeves, pants and gloves. And, for the love of Pete….
• Wear goggles.
  We didn’t and we’re still regretting it. Our eyes are totally scratchy and raw.
• Dress your dog up for Halloween.
  It has nothing to do with insulating, but it’ll make you feel good. Trust us.
  

We’ll be back with some more updates on what’s going on in our casa. Hint: it’s getting hot in here. We’ll take off all our clothes. Not really.But at least we’re no longer going to bed in sweaters and wool socks. Stay tuned for that, coming up soon!

Everything we need to know about home renovation, we learned from Mr. Miyagi.

Bradley and I are total children of the ’80s, which means two things: 1) we grew up with some very embarrassing haircuts, and 2) Mr. Miyagi was a god. So when it came time to sand our floors, we cued up this YouTube clip and took notes:

Sanding floors, painting houses, defending against attacks from those dastardly Cobra Kai — home renovation is serious business. Now if only we could find a teenage boy we could con into renovating the house for us…

On Saturday morning, we marched on over to the Home Depot tool rental department and came back home with this puppy:

We had the option between a heavy-duty belt sander and a disc sander. We went with the disc sander. According to our Home Depot guy, the belt sander gets a better finish, but it’s harder to use. There was a definite potential of shaving too much off if we didn’t know what we were doing. We’ve never actually sanded floors before so we decided to play it safe. The disc sander still gets a nice finish and it’s way more user-friendly.

The Home Depot guy gave us a quick rundown on the proper way to use the machine. Here’s the right way:

Wear a respirator. Keep the sander close to your body so you can use your body weight to steer it. Keep the cord out of the sander’s way, and keep both hands on the handles at all times.

Here are some wrong ways to use a sander:

1. Do not ride the sander.

2. Do not Superman on the sander.

3. Do not surf on the sander.

4. Do not read a magazine while sanding.

5. Do not let pugs sand your floor. Not without a proper pug sander attachment, anyway.

And most importantly:

6. Do not attempt to sand your floors with anything other than a sander.

Now that we have that cleared up, it’s time to get on with the sanding. We started with a quick check to remove any staples or nails we might have missed:

Then we loaded up the sander with fresh 36-grit sandpaper:

The lowdown on sandpaper:

• The lower the number, the rougher the paper.
• The higher the number, the less gritty, so really high numbers will smooth and polish.
• You can’t jump from a really gritty sandpaper to a really smooth sandpaper. You have to work your way up gradually to get a really even surface. So start with a lower-grit sandpaper, then go a little higher, then a little higher, and finish off with a high-grit sandpaper.

We started with 36-grit, then re-sanded with 40-grit, 80-grit and ended with a 120-grit. That means we had to sand each room 4 times total. And we had to do it in 24 hours. It sounds like a lot of work, but we were up for the challenge. After living with our crusty old floors for 5 months, we were feeling downright giddy:

We flipped the on switch and let ‘er rip:

We had at least 2 layers of paint to strip, but the 35-grit sandpaper ate right through it. We were initially a little nervous about getting too close to the walls, but the disc sander was great for getting right up to the edge:

The sandpaper is underneath the machine, so it didn’t hit our wall at all. We had to replace our sanding discs pretty frequently because the the paint gummed things up:

This isn’t something we planned for, so just a few hours after bringing the sander home, we were on our last set of discs. Oops! Bradley handed over the sander to me while he ran to Home Depot to get more. I was sweating bullets all day because I knew eventually I would have to SAND THE FLOOR! and I wasn’t sure I could do it.

The sander is big. And loud. I had visions of tripping and falling in front of it, and the 35-grit sandpaper eating up my face. Or worse — what if I lost control and the sander crashed through a wall? Or if I got stuck in one spot and it ate a hole through the floor? What if the “off” switch broke and I had to sand and sand forever?

I obviously watched too many sitcoms growing up because stuff like that only happens on TV. At the time, though, it all seemed very likely. But we only had 24 hours with our sander and I had no choice but to get over it. I took a deep breath, grabbed the handles, flipped the switch and started sanding. The verdict? It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. It was sort of like using a vacuum cleaner. A really big, heavy vacuum cleaner that vibrates and shakes the entire room. OK, fine, it wasn’t like using a vacuum cleaner at all. But it wasn’t horrifying. I still have a face and our floors are intact. So I call that a success.

We vacuumed after each round of sanding to check out our progress. The sander actually doesn’t kick up dust into the air at all, but it does leave some dust behind on the floor.  Here’s how the guest bedroom looked after 40-grit:

Smooooth! When we first removed the carpet, we were so disappointed to find soft pine planks instead of a gorgeous hardwood, but the floors have really grown on us.

After the guest bedroom, we headed over to the office. This room was more of a challenge than the guest bedroom because it has hard pine flooring instead of soft pine. They’re harder to sand. There was also glue under the carpets, and those patches needed some serious work to sand off:

There was also this beast to deal with:

That radiator easily weighs 400 pounds. It’s massive. We thought we could just put it on the dolly and wheel it around, but that left gashes in the wood. To sand around it, we had to pick it up and waddle it over to the other side of the room. We went back and forth with it for 4 rounds of sanding. Still surprised neither of us ended up with a hernia from that.

Here’s how the office looked after sanding:

It was already dark by the time we finished, so we got to test out our new recessed lightbulbs:

It took us 3 trips to the hardware stores, but we finally found bulbs that sit really far back in the can and cast a nice light. The others all either sat out too far or looked too blue, so we returned them. We’re loving how the lighting adds instant drama to the room:

The little space right outside the office didn’t sand so well:

We went over it for what seemed like forever, but the paint never quite came off. We’re not sure if it’s just soaked really deeply into the wood, but we scuffed it so much that our paint will definitely stick to it.

By the time we finished all 4 rounds of sanding in the office and guest bedroom, it was 8PM. We still had the hallway to do, but we also didn’t want to piss off our neighbors. I did a quick check to see how loud we were being by running out to the yard and standing right in front of the fence that divides our property from our neighbor’s. Inside the house, it sounded like a tornado was happening upstairs. Outside, it was barely a hum. I had to strain to hear it. Looks like all our insulation and new windows helped soundproof the place as well as keep it warm!

We decided to keep going and finish up the hallway before going to bed:

We’d been sanding for over 9 hours by the time we finished, and we were wiped out. We didn’t bother cleaning up after we finished. On Sunday morning, we went back up to vacuum and take some daylight pictures:

And then we decided to go ahead and sand the dining room floors. Bradley spent part of Saturday prepping the room while I sanded. We weren’t sure whether we’d have time for the dining room, but we wanted to be ready just in case. Good thing, too, because we had 4 hours still left on the clock and that gave us plenty of time. Here’s what they looked like before Bradley prepped the room:

And here’s how they look now:

You can also take a peek at the afters in the “no” pictures above. My favorite:

I love the look on Jabba’s face in that one. Don’t feel sorry for her, peeps. That dog loves our shenanigans.

Coming up next:

We’re painting our floors! I’d better go brush up on Mr. Miyagi’s recommendations. Is it side-to-side? Or up-down? I forget. We’ll be back with more updates, so stay tuned.

—

What we learned from our floor-sanding adventure:

• Give yourself plenty of time.
  Our Home Depot offers a 4-hour rental and a 24-hour rental. The 4-hour rental is $20 cheaper, but we’re pretty sure we couldn’t finish up even one room in that amount of time.
• Buy more than you need.
  We could have saved an emergency trip to Home Depot by stocking up and then returning all the unopened packs for a refund when we took the sander back. Luckily there are 2 of us here, so 1 person could sand while the other ran to Home Depot. And that brings us to the most important lesson we learned…
• It takes two.
  Having 2 people around was a major help in getting 3 rooms and a hallway sanded in less than 24 hours. One person could sand while the other prepped the next room. We also traded off sanding duties every couple of hours. That way our arms could rest up in between sanding sessions, but we still plugged along at the same pace. Plus, the sander was crazy-heavy. It definitely takes 2 people to haul that thing up and down stairs. Partner up, people! Now show me….SAND THE FLOOR!

Blogging From The Flood Zone and How “A Cat Peed On My Drywall” Saved Our Basement

Hey, peeps! We’re not sure if we’ve ever mentioned it on the blog, but we live 6 short blocks away from the Susquehanna River. You know. The one that’s on the news right now for severe and record-breaking flash floods. Eeps!! In our area, the big emergency is that a part of that dike (aka the running trail Bradley and I love) has washed away. It’s not a good situation.

Before anyone panics (ahem, Bradley’s mom), we should go ahead and mention that we’re safe and sound in a very elevated area about 20 miles away from our house. We’re OK, really!

We were both at work in New York City, totally clueless about what was going on, when I received a text message from a new friend who lives a few blocks away (thank you, Jhane!). She let us know that our area was being evacuated and that roads would be shutting down soon. I called Bradley right away and we basically went into panic mode.

The smart thing to do would have been to say in NYC, but our cat was home alone. We knew we couldn’t live with ourselves if something happened to that cranky old turd, and we could have been stuck in NYC for up to a week due to road closures. So instead of doing the smart thing, we did what we thought was the right thing: we both left work early, jumped in the car and rushed home to rescue our feline friend. (Big thank you to our understanding bosses!)

When we got home, we noticed right away that there was a funky odor in the air. We ran to the basement to check out the situation below ground level and found this:

Sorry about the bad photo. We only had time for iPhonetography. That’s standing water in our basement. I guessed it was about 3 inches, but it went over Bradley’s ankles when he stood in it, so it was really more like 6 inches. We could hear it pouring in through the walls — literally the sound of a running faucet turned on high — and we flipped out.

We knew there was a sump pump in our basement (you can see it sticking up though the water on the top left hand side of the photo above), but we weren’t sure if it actually worked. It’s in a totally random location and there are no plug-ins anywhere near it. It’s been off ever since we got the house. Bradley ran an extension cord down to the basement, plugged in the pump and — yay! — it hummed and turned on. He ran the drain pipe outside, but it was pretty short. Still, it was pumping water out and that was better than nothing.

While the pump did it’s thang, we rushed upstairs to move everything from the first floor of the house up to the second floor. We’ve been complaining about being forced to live out of boxes, but they came in pretty handy last night. We just schlepped everything up to the guest bedroom — even the couch. The heavier stuff (like our brand new media cabinet and our bed) stayed downstairs, but we elevated them. We have a twin-sized daybed that was sitting in our dining room, and once we carried the mattress upstairs, we had a platform that we could stack a bunch of things on.

While we were carrying things upstairs, we couldn’t help but peek in the neighboring houses, and a lot of people were just hanging out and watching TV. We starting questioning whether we were overreacting. But, whatevs, this is our first flood. We took the paranoid first-time-homeowner route, and we don’t regret it.

After everything was off the floor, we went back downstairs to deal with the water pouring in through the walls. Once we took a look around, we could see that water was dripping in through several spots, but the faucet noise was coming from one dime-sized hole in the wall.

We had a quick brainstorm of all the things we could possibly shove in the hole to at least slow the water down. Cork from a wine bottle? Didn’t have one. A rag? Wouldn’t do much. Silicone? Not with the amount of water that was pouring in. And then, Bradley had it: “Rope!!” Uhhh, rope? “Didn’t you tell me that’s what shipbuilders use?” Oh. Em. Gee. YES. It is. Sorta.

A couple of weeks ago, I got all caught up with reading A Cat Peed On My Drywall, a renovation blog based in Nova Scotia. They mentioned an old shipbuilding technique for filling in gaps between wood planks — you just take a length of rope and shove it into the cracks. They were using it for insulating their cold wood floors, but I shared the post with Bradley because their floors ended up looking super cool.

Maybe it’s because I told Bradley it was a shipbuilding technique (he’s way into anything that involves building anything), but the whole stuff-rope-in-it thing stuck in his head. Standing there up to our ankles in mucky water, listening to the Niagara Falls version of basement leaks, it sounded like a really good idea. The rope would get wet and expand, which would at least slow the flow of water. It sounded logical in a crazy kinda way.

Bradley grabbed some rope, a hammer, and a fat nail. He used the hammer and nail to bang the rope into the hole. It took about 15 minutes and a lot more rope than we originally thought, but eventually, the water stopped. We were so geeked! Once it stopped, Bradley quickly applied a bunch of caulk around the area. We’re not sure if it’ll hold until the worst of the flood is over, but the rope is in there so tight that it’s not coming out for a while. And it’s better than nothing, right? (Thanks for giving us the idea ACPOMD! Love your blog, and a belated congrats on your pregnancy!)

Once the leak situation was under control, we went out to the garage and moved all of our building supplies and tools up to the garage attic. Everything that was too big to squeeze through the attic entry was raised up on cinder blocks.

The entire ordeal — getting everything moved upstairs, pumping the basement, sealing the leak, packing food and clothes for the evacuation — took about 5 hours. We decided not to wait until the morning to evacuate and left at 1am, exhausted, but feeling pretty good about all the prep work we did.

Even though the building we’re staying in is way above flood levels, they’re still expecting power outages in the area and the roads are shutting down. We woke up this morning and ran to pick up some rain boots for Bradley:

He was wading around in the nasty basement water in flip flops, and he was shivering from the cold the entire time. We figured we might as well get ‘em now, just in case.

Next stop was the grocery store where we stocked up on enough food to get us through a couple of days. We saw a lot of people stocking up on frozen foods, refrigerated goods and fresh meat. Super weird. We’re definitely not experts in emergency preparedness, but we thought we should get things that are shelf stable, just in case the power goes out. We grabbed some bread, crackers, peanut butter, canned beans, canned soup, brown rice and some fruits & veggies that don’t need refrigeration. We also grabbed one small package of chicken breast. If the power goes out, it won’t be a huge loss. We have access to a gas grill, so we’re all set. We also stocked up on bottled water and we have candles, lighters and flashlights ready to go.

After that, we hit up a cheap diner for a little pre-flood calorie-bomb action. Nothing says comfort food like breakfast for lunch:

L to R: pancakes, coffee, bacon, scrambled eggs. There was also some toast, but it hadn’t arrived yet. Best $11 we’ve spent in a long time…even though neither of us could actually finish that grotesque amount of food.

Now we’re both lounging around, waiting for the flooding to hurry up and happen.  And hurry up and end, hopefully. It’s the waiting around that’s driving us bananas. We’re not sure how long the evacuation will last, but we’re pretty sure we won’t be doing any renovating this weekend. We still have a ton of Labor Day weekend projects to share, though, so stay tuned for those. And if you’re in the flood area, stay safe and stay dry!