I feel like 75% of the stuff I do around the house falls into this category. Yawn, I dragged all the branches from the yard to the burn pile. Yawn, I ran all the refrigerator shelves through the dishwasher. And so on.

This one definitely falls into that category.

It’s part of the neverending garage project. See, around the framing of the garage door itself there were a lot of gaps. The largest of these was above the door. I did some investigating and found that at some point the previous owners had shoved old curtains into that gap.

Let us never again discuss the disgustingness of 40+ year old curtains that had then been shoved into a random crevice in a basement and left for another 20 years. BLERGH. I half-wish I had taken pictures of them so you could’ve seen the rotted, dusty, dead bug awfulness.

Once I removed the curtains, I could see daylight through some pretty good cracks where they…I don’t know, hadn’t framed the door right? Maybe the house settled funny? Who even knows. This house is such a weird mishmash of exceptionally well done upgrades and total amateur hour bullshit.

Anyway, this was a pretty short and sweet project once I finally got off my ass to do it. I used this stuff; it was $5 a can at the local lumber yard.

There was a little bit of a learning curve in getting it aimed, seeing how it would stick, and seeing how much it expanded, but honestly – within 20 minutes I had that gap perfectly filled and airtight.

Easy peasy!

Last winter, when you walked by the garage door you could feel a bitter chill coming in from these gaps. The one last piece of the total puzzle is a new rubber sealing thingamabob for the bottom of the door. I bought that a while ago and just have to put it on – that will be another good short project in coming weeks.

So, here’s to no more icy drafts in that corner of the basement!

Not the most exciting project, but one of those that makes the house feel a little more finished.

See, when we did the electrical work we wired for two ceiling fans, one in each bathroom. My father and I put the one in the upstairs bathroom in place, and the downstairs one came about months later with the help of a handyman, who also vented the upstairs fan with me.

When we put the upstairs fan into place, we didn’t realize that it came apart into as many pieces as it actually did. So we cut the hole bigger than was strictly necessary for the fan to fit in. Result: a gap around the fan. There was also a hole from the old light fixture.

For about 14 months, then, the upstairs bathroom ceiling looked like this.

The fix was a two part piece of work. The straight-up hole had to be braced with another piece of sheetrock and then mudded over, and the hole where the light fixture was had to be just mudded over.

So part one: patching the sheetrock. That required going up into the attic and working from above.

Unfortunately, that meant that it did not cut or break like the sheetrock I was used to, so after several attempts to get a piece that would fit into the gap, I was left with just a pile of broken sheetrock.

On to Plan B: using some of the endless scraps I have in the basement left over from the wall project. That went much more quickly, and after quite a bit of trimming I got a piece that dropped into the gap easily enough.

Then, I found a scrap piece of 2×4, also left over from building the wall, and because I didn’t want to actually trim the thing and it was so close to fitting, I hammered it into place.

It wasn’t going anywhere short of an earthquake, but I put a couple of screws diagonally and down into the floor beams anyway.

Next step, going back underneath and screwing up from the new piece of sheetrock into the new wood brace. I put one of the screws through the fan itself, though it was already quite secure, just to be extra careful – it was easy enough to just move a screw half an inch to the right and get some extra solidity.

Then: bring on the mud!

Two layers for the patched area, and three for the hole leftover from the old light fixture, with sanding in between. This was mostly a matter of hurry up and wait. 24 hours to dry a coat, 5 minutes to sand it down, another 5 minutes to apply more plaster. I could’ve done it in three days but there were a few evenings I opted out on account of laziness. So this past Friday night I did the last sanding and put the light back in place and voila!

The real last step is to repaint the bathroom ceiling but that’s not happening. I might use some of the paint from the downstairs bathroom ceiling to patch these pieces really quickly, but it won’t match exactly. Until we redo the entire bathroom, I’m not going to repaint the entire ceiling.

We rewired the house last July, but I’m still working on the various pieces of things leftover from that.

One of those things was the dining room chandelier. We had taken it down as part of the rewiring, and then it looked like it was old, bad wiring, so we left it down. About a month after that, I had time to examine it more thoroughly and it was fine! Someone had just done a dumbass patch job that they didn’t even need to do – basically they thought they didn’t have enough wire to reach the ceiling box, so they spliced in some extra inches very badly, and after who knows how many years that had started to fray and come apart. I just yanked that extra wire out, the original wires were in fine shape, and with some careful maneuvering and help from a friend, put the fixture back up.

Except.

It was a very old chandelier, and it was in many pieces down a central column. Each piece was held together in a slightly different way, mostly variations on several long hollow screws. They were all precisely measured, and try as we might, we could not get them to all work together to allow the fixture to look and hang normally again.

(this is where I’d put a picture of that crooked chandelier if I had thought to take a picture of it but alas I was not that smart_

After a while, we just left it as best as we could, and so the fixture hung crookedly for about a year. Also, sort of from the wires which was obviously less than ideal and okay, fine, kind of dangerous, but you had to be there to realize just how maddening trying to get that puzzle right was.

Anyway.

I finally got sick of staring at it, and started to think about how I could fix it, when I was at the hardware store looking for something I discovered two things.

First things first: I’m still alive! And I have been doing quite a lot. I’ve even been writing blog posts in my head, which I guess doesn’t count?

Anyway, back into the swing of things. The summer heat has broken in Vermont, it was in the low 40s overnight, and we just got back from a two week vacation, about which more later. So I am itching to DO things again.

Organizing the basement is a nearly-endless quest. I’ve made some huge steps, though.

Previously, we moved over the old huge shelving and made room for extra kitchen things.

That still left a whole lotta basement to organize.

And finally, here’s what that corner looks like now. Progress!

When last we left the back bedroom, a whole army of friends had stripped all of the wallpaper.

They were enthusiastic but not very detail-oriented, so there was still a fair bit to do.

Chiefly, I had to remove the little snagged bits of wallpaper left, and wash off the wallpaper glue. This worked much more easily than it had in any other room. I filled a bottle with half vinegar, half water, and a squirt or two of Dawn dish soap. I sprayed that on the wall, let it sit for a few minutes, and then scrubbed with a sponge dipped in hot water. Rinse the sponge, so on and so forth. It took a few days, doing one wall a day after work, but it wasn’t hard work. I could have easily done it in a day if I had time.

Then, color: Sherwin Williams “Sand Dollar” which does not come through in photos but is essentially a warm beige. I kind of wish it had been a shade or two darker, but this is the darkest room in the house, so – it’s probably good to stay light.

The last phase was supposed to be pulling up the carpet, but, well…

Though I have not been blogging, things are still going on. I’ve wanted to construct raised beds for gardening for some time now; last summer, I stuck to container gardening in Tristan’s old supplement buckets on our porch. That worked okay – I got some good tomatoes out of it, but it was less than ideal.

So for this summer, I went off into the deep end, of course.

When we re-wired the house, we discovered that the previous front porch lights were DONE.

They were probably original to the house, c. 1928, and the insulation on the wiring had melted off. The metal of the lights themselves was done. Kaput. Unsalvageable. How they had not simply disintegrated off the front of the house or caused a fire is a mystery to me.

I found new front porch lights that I loved in, of all places, HGTV Magazine (I KNOW), but they were hundreds of dollars apiece. I showed them to my in-laws when they were visiting and my father-in-law, who loves a challenge, emailed me a link a few weeks later to some very similar lights for $120 each. Sold!

Then the project kept languishing. See, the previous lights had simply been screwed on to the front of the house without regard for the slant of the siding. That was reasonable because they were dangling – they would right themselves via gravity. That was not the case for our new lights.

We hemmed and hawed and debated and bought 2 different versions of mounting blocks that seemed like they might fit over the siding but were the wrong size and I tried to hire our handyman guy to do it but a) he was booked months and months out and b) he really thought I could do it myself. I guess I gave him way too high an opinion of my competence during the ceiling fan project?

In the meantime…basically we had bare bulbs hanging on their wires off the front of our house. For a long time. They were under eaves so it wasn’t a huge problem but it was still Not Good.

Finally, FINALLY, I put it to the top of the list for my parents’ next visit, and my magical father brought all his tools and put up our new lights.

So, previously I shared the project that was re-plastering the walls of the kitchen to cover holes large and small.

Once that was complete, it was time to paint!

Most of the reason for repainting the kitchen was to freshen it up. First, the wallpaper removal had left a sort of ugly bit around the top edges of the walls – either the scrapes from the removal or the tacky discoloration left over after the glue. Second: it’s a kitchen! The walls were spattered and stained after 30 years of use, even with regular washing.

Next up: repainting the kitchen now that the wallpaper is gone and the walls are replastered.

This will be a very much in-progress kind of post, but let it serve as a marker. I’m slowly chipping away at solving our basement storage.

When we first moved in, the basement was the dumping ground. Which made total sense at the time, and I don’t regret it. But going down there was an exercise in claustrophobia and anxiety – at least for me, considering the contentment I get out of well-organized spaces with everything in its right place.

But over the winter and the last few weeks, we’ve slowly chipped away at that: emptying boxes and getting their contents put away, thinking through what should go where, buying new storage containers to actually organize things that would stay in the basement.

Several weeks ago, when we had friends staying with us (the same ones who stripped our wallpaper), I enlisted their help to move the giant shelving unit that sat just at the base of the stairs.

By giant, I mean probably 20′ long, 5′ deep, and about 4.5′ tall. That meant that it was basically too big to be usable for us. I’m honestly not sure what previous owners used it for – storage of things they never wanted to see again? For us, it just attracted clutter. I think the longterm plan will be to dismantle it and take it to the dump, but I can’t bring myself to do that quite yet.

So anyway: the shelving unit got shoved right.