Weekend = Too Fast

I took a slightly longer lunch Friday because I knew I wouldn't have time over the weekend and I needed to do something about my giant bowl of tomatoes before they went to waste. The bowl just keeps filling, by the way..

I’ve been thinking about this technique I saw a while back – you take the innards out of the tomatoes and slow roast the..hulls, I guess you’d call them, until the flavor is really concentrated. I salted and peppered to add flavor and sprinkled with sugar to take the acidity out of the tomatoes. I also rough chopped a few cloves of garlic and threw that on the pile. Roast on a sheet pan with a wire rack for as long as you like..you'll smell garlic and tomato all over the house.

A couple black cherry tomatoes, yellow, beefeater, Roma, and others. Not a job you do in your dress pants.
http://beyondthebluegate.blogspot.com/

I didn’t roast mine for as long as I would have liked..again, because I was doing this on my lunch break..but I think the end result was really great, nonetheless. The tomatoes still had enough moisture in them that they created a sauce-like consistency when run through the food processor, but weren’t as ‘bright’ tasting as they would have been right off the vine. The garlic added a lot of flavor, and the sugar helped mellow everything out. Because I had so many different varieties of tomatoes, it’s a really deeply flavored sauce. Once I’ve got some pasta, I’ll add some herbs or wine (or nothing at all) and enjoy truly homemade pasta sauce!

Saturday morning, I got out of bed ready to rumble! Before breakfast, I decided to go outside and start salvaging the bricks from the two front steps that I’m having redone. Once I started chipping away at the brickwork, I realized just how bad the condition of the steps really was. The brick was actually the best part of the step..they really didn’t want to let go, save for a few.

This was taken shortly before I bought the house..and the cracks had only gotten wider.

A couple of the bricks had been falling out anyway, and a few came with a little help.

10 minutes later..

The rest of the bricks were STUCK and wouldn't budge..but the whole step would. As I see it, the steps were poured on a short, shallow limestone foundation, so there was a lot of heaving with every freeze/thaw cycle. This explains the cracks and out-of-level appearance.

About an hour later, my parents came by and we made quite a bit of headway on the baseboard project, finishing up most all of the kitchen and laundry areas. All that is left to do is the bathroom, my bedroom, and a small closet!

Laundry all trimmed out and painted!

Dad worked on the toe kick part of the kitchen cabinets – very snazzy (and very FINISHED looking!)

From the laundry: notice the area under the cabinets? Dad finished that up Saturday. Our friend Aimee came and fixed my kitchen outlets, too..everything's coming together!

Mom and I wandered around caulking and touch-up painting. Everything looks so much better once it’s all been ‘tightened’ up a bit J

Saturday was my time away from my projects. I went to Des Moines to spend time with friends and ended up staying through to Sunday night. A couple really cool stops along the way:

·         http://zombieburgerdm.com/ - been here several times. The food is awesome!

·         http://www.continental-lounge.com/ - super classy/sexy bar. Had a sidecar and listened to jazz with a lady friend. Instantly felt like Don Draper.

The "Planet Terror" at Zombie Burger: Cheddar cheese, bacon, BBQ sauce, caramelized onions.
I had the "Dead Moines", not pictured: ham, prosciutto, gouda, and truffle mayo. Gets better every time I go!

Yeah..this basically sums up my Saturday..

It's beginning to look a lot like..finished :)

So, I’ve been posting much shorter entries lately. Which, for long-time readers, is probably fine because there are a few over the past several months that are a bit lengthy. Anyway..for whatever reason, the shorter posts just seem more in line with what’s going on around the house lately. Little projects here are there being finished up – but the impact of those projects is pretty huge!

The last “little” project to be done was painting the inside of the house. The entire. Inside. Of the house. When compared to building a garage or rewiring the entire place, it’s not a huge project..but it took some time, nonetheless. Now that that’s been completed, we got back into trimming things out.

Last night’s project du jour was the quarter round in the front half of the house. When we tore out the plaster and lath and replaced it with drywall, there was a pretty good sized gap between where the wood floor ended and where the wall (and even baseboard, in some spots) began.

Remember these gaps? No more!

The solution I chose was a thicker, taller baseboard that would be more in keeping with the age and scale of the house, and a ¾” x ¾” quarter round strip to fill in the gap and give it a more polished look.

I bought the quarter-round preprimed - all we had to do was throw on a couple coats of the 'White Dove' paint, cut it, and pop it in place.

Over the course of a couple hours last night, we had pretty much everything done save for a few small pieces in the office, and it looks really great!

Much more finished looking!

A few days ago, I took the time to organize where all the ‘header’ pieces would go – because we’re working with salvaged stuff, nothing fits exactly over the doorways in my house, so I was trying to fit each piece to a door with as little cut-waste as possible. Once I had everything placed, we cut the pieces down to fit as needed and did the necessary cutting, sanding, and filling to make them look good once they were in place. As of last night, the laundry room was done and we were starting to think about the more complex cuts for the pieces over the bathroom doors.

Last Tuesday’s farm box came and I feel a little embarrassed that I haven’t used up much of the produce..especially because the next box comes today at 4! Anyway, last night I made up a batch of seat-of-my-pants eggplant Parmesan. I say seat of my pants because I had never had 1. Eggplant, or 2. Eggplant Parmesan. I knew the basics – after all, two of the ingredients are in the name – but had never done it before. Granted, mine was the quickie version – no baking, just skillet-quick – but it was really good and gave me the confidence to buy and use eggplant again in the future!

OK, I cheated..this is NOT a picture of my eggplant Parmesan. I scarfed mine before taking a picture.
And this one looks better.

The other thing I tried was much more by the book – I found a recipe online for a banana cake that looked and sounded really good. I can usually kind of take or leave banana cakes, breads, etc. but this one was quite good. Really dense and moist with lots of cream cheese frosting. (The frosting was not from the recipe..it was mine: 1# cream cheese, ½# butter, 1# powdered sugar, 1t vanilla. So good.)

Waiting for the oven.

Trimmed the rounded top off the bottom layer (and dipped it in frosting..nice snack :) )

Again..cheated..not mine. But mine was kind of crooked - I'm not a professional, get over it.

http://www.bonappetit.com/recipes/2012/05/double-banana-cake

I brought the cake to work Monday, gave a hunk to mom and dad, and had a piece for dessert after my eggplant Parm..and it was pretty well gone! Which is fine..the last thing I need is a double-decker cake staring at me every time I open the fridge.

More trim tonight, I suppose – will post pictures as good things continue to happen! J

Almost forgot my trip (back) to Cedar Rapids! My friends were getting rid of a perfectly good twin bed that I will be putting in my office for visiting friends. We stopped off at Parlor City Pub & Eatery again this time and were very happy with it. Awesome beer selection and good food! http://www.parlorcitypub.com/

Hodge-podge

This is one of those ‘catch-all’ blogs I do that pertain to everything and nothing all at once.

The first part of that is me being a creeper and taking random pictures of random people’s property J I went on a little farm visit late last week for work – I had to take pictures of the houses and outbuildings on the property to satisfy my underwriters, and ended up deciding I might like to be a farmer if I could be a farmer on this particular farm.

Maybe I'm just too big a city-boy, but I don't know many of you who have cool little 100-year-old water towers in your yard. Or playhouses.. these are cool grandparents :)

This spring has really gotten to me for some reason. It’s unseasonably warm, everything is in bloom, the sun is shining, the breeze is blowing just enough to mess your hair and it’s amazing. Something about this old farm – and Iowa in general – just struck me as being the coolest place in the world at that particular moment. It has been in operation by the same family for over a hundred years and it has just the right amount of character that comes from 50 layers of paint and thousands of feet shuffling across the front porch. Luckily, the owner was happy to show it off J

I didn't know what this bush was? Fire engine red blooms. Like I said, this spring is getting to me.

Back on my homestead..

The baseboard project has gone really well! I have designated myself as the outside corner master. Inside corners..not so much, but we’ve decided “That’s why God made wood putty.” When it’s all painted and sanded, it looks really great..just like it’s been there forever J Pictures to come!

After a long Saturday of crawling around on the floor with the baseboard project, I decided to walk up the block to the brewery to take in the music. I hadn’t shown you the brewery yet, so I snapped a picture. Good beer, good music, no manual labor. It was a great night!

The Brewery in all its live music glory.

Dad and I worked most of the morning yesterday leveling out the backyard and making the back of the neighboring apartment building’s garage look less like a bomb had gone off near it. The latter of which turned into kind of a neighborhood effort: we raked the brush and pulled some old wood out away from the building, the neighbors came by to help haul stuff away, and a friend brought by some hosta splits from her garden. I watered them in last night and again this morning..we’ll see how they do!

My backyard was less a neighborhood effort, and more sweat on Dad and my part. Since my concrete man laid my driveway and the footings/slab for the garage, we’ve had these piles of dirt/gravel lying around. He offered to level everything out for us, but we borrowed our neighbors tiller and got after it. It looks much nicer than before, and it should be ready for homegrown produce whenever I am. …which could be a while, but it’s a nice thought.

Today, I’m back to work, but Dad has the day off and decided to build a prototype cabinet for the kitchen. We’ve got the materials and many of the tools..now if we could prove our measurements are correct we’ll be off and running!

It looks like a cabinet, right? Actually, shortly after I took this, Dad put its feet on and it looked much more convincing. We'll work on drawer slides soon and after a few more boxes come together we'll cut out a face frame..and it will be glorious.

More cabinets tonight, I imagine..and more pictures to follow!

Superbase

This weekend was the last I’ll see of the dogs for a while. The parents made it back from Texas late Friday night, and took the dogs Saturday afternoon. I took lunch over to their place and we got a game plan for the weekend.

My little carpentry project last weekend: lining the closet with wood, hanging shelves, and painting. One or two more coats should do it..the roommate got antsy to move her things back in..

Dad and I decided we’d like to get started hanging the baseboard. And while the thought was nice, the execution was going to drive me crazy.

For a while now, every time I’ve gone to look for something it has miraculously gone missing... either because I’m a crazy person or because everyone puts things in a different place when they’re done. So, rather than wander the house for an hour looking for tape measures and things like that, we decided to clean and organize the garage as it has needed it for quite a while.

You can tell we cleaned, right?

Believe me, it's so much better than it was!

We finished up with that project and had dinner at my place. Take-out = no dishes.

Sunday morning, I got the chance to work on my surround sound system a bit. I ordered a system through our local Radio Shack and it came in! I started putzing around with it Friday on my lunch break, but quickly decided that I was probably going to need to focus on this project for longer than the extra 25 minutes I had at the time. In addition to the speakers, I bought a kit that will mount each unit to the ceiling and orient the speakers so the sound hits me in the teeth while I’m sitting on the couch J

Tiny rear surround speaker. It rocks :)

We had computer speakers rigged up to the TV for sound. Shouldn't need those anymore!

Dad stopped over just in time to lend a hand with this project and it went together pretty smoothly.

After that, we got to work on the baseboard. After messing with the table saw for a bit, we got to work and got quite a bit done considering we were sort of learning as we went along.

This is what we were up against..

Because the floors slope toward the front of the house (remember, my “greenhouse” was originally a porch.. and the floor still sheds water!), we thought for a while about the best way to hang the baseboard. I decided that I’d like the trim to be at the same level all the way through the house. Whether that’s the easy way to do it or the hard way, I don’t know.. Anyway, I bought 8” and 10” baseboard so that we would have plenty of excess board when scribing it to the variations in the floor.

We still need to lay some quarter-round along the bottom to hide any gaps, but it already looks so much better!

We got to the point where we’ll have to switch over to the 10” boards before calling it a night. More work on this tonight, I imagine.

One corner hung, waiting for holes to be filled and sanded. See the need for quarter-round here?

And you can see the floor sinking slightly here. The closer you get to the front door, the more the floor drops. We've got taller boards to make up the difference.

As I write this, Dad is on his way to the store to pick up materials for cabinet-making! We measured everything before he left for Texas, and once the baseboard is hung, we should have room in the garage to build a few boxes. Pictures and posts to follow…wish us luck! J

This is what the door/drawer fronts should look like (we hope!) when done. They'll be painted the same white as the trim, door jambs, and fireplace brick. Again, wish us luck :)

No, I'm not dead.

I’m just a really bad updater.

But I’ve been busy!

Not only did I have my first (birthday!) party in the house, but I’ve welcomed two new roommates..one of whom is a cat.

A house-warming palm! And my giganto aloe..I told you I was turning this into a greehouse!

The birthday party was really great. 20-25 people..just big enough that we could have a dance party in the living room, and small enough that I got to talk to everyone and thank them for coming J It was also just a really good excuse to see people I haven’t seen in a while. Some of my best friends made the trip from Cedar Rapids or Des Moines just for the night..and I was so glad to have them! Everybody gets so busy that we don’t always take the time to hop in the car and go see one another on the weekends.

Wal-Mart plants on the window ledge in the dining room.

It was also pretty cool because I invited a bunch of people that I like, but didn’t necessarily know all that well outside of work or the occasional run-in. By the end of the night, I think everyone had met somebody new and become closer to people they hadn’t known as well before. Mission: Accomplished.

Lots of compliments on the house – especially the light fixtures. It made me feel like all the work we’ve been doing has really paid off (not that having a roof over my head wasn’t payment enough, but you get the idea).

My new (old) cupboard in the dining room! It's currently holding every dish, cup, fork and spoon I own..in addition to displaying all my moonshinin' stuff on top.
Disclosure: I don't actually make my own booze. I bought this because I thought it looked cool. Though, after watching "Moonshiners" last weekend, I think I might like to try it one day :)

The roommate thing has been in the works for a couple weeks. I didn’t say anything because I have this tendency to say things with regard to the house that don’t materialize.. (i.e. I’m moving in THIS WEEKEND!!  ..three months later). I thought pretty hard about it, and decided that it would probably be alright, even though I really like my alone time.

From the laundry, looking through the kitchen into the dining room (with more pieces of the whiskey still) and the living room beyond.

Granted, it’s only been a little while; but, so far, I think things are going well. The cat is actually providing a valuable service by killing any spiders it sees roaming the floor, and the roommate Swiffers said floor almost every day before I get home from work. It’s apparently a cat-hair-related Swiffering, but it’s a Swiffering nonetheless.

The cat-roommate is entirely against everything I have ever said I would do. Ever. I am not a cat person and don’t know that I ever truly will be. But, this cat comes with my friend who comes with a few hundred dollars a month in rent. Which is nice. Also, the aforementioned spider-killing is reassuring. As long as I stay on his good side, Charlie the cat will patrol the house for movement.

Charlie the Spider Slayer. I caught him between yawns..it's been another rough afternoon.

That said: if he pees outside his litter box, I’m sending him to “the farm” where he can “play with the other cats.”

Progress has slowed slightly since the roommate moved in. Helping her move in and then re-situating everything in the kitchen and bathroom took some time. But, this past weekend we got back after it and finishing routing, sanding, and painting the baseboard.

8 & 10" baseboard routed, sanded, and painted. Boom.

This has been a pretty cool project, actually. I was dreading it because I don’t know how to run the router. I tried two boards: the first was fine; the second looked like cooked bacon…a little wavy. Luckily, the former Roommates spent a good chunk of the weekend over here in the garage and we got it knocked out.

Now to hang it and finish it with quarter round. Then on to a new project!

I saw a version of this on another blog: using a painters canvas dropcloth as a curtain. I'll hang it from the 1/2" conduit and have a custom, made-to-fit system for my baywindow. Total cost: $18. I like the color and texture of this stuff.. More to come!

Tonights dinner: I've had this chicken soaking in a brine overnight (all the onions and carrots have sunk to the bottom)..I'll let you know how it tastes. By the way, those are peppercorns...just so you know! ;)

How much wood could a woodchuck chuck..

We have been woodchucks here at the house the last few nights. Chucking old wood trim up onto the wall and giving things a more finished look. Granted, I still have holes to fill and another coat or two of paint to apply, but things are looking really good so far!

The old trim we're using came from the house next door that's being demolished soon. It has these nice blocks at the baseboard level that make the doors look like somebody wealthy lives in this house instead of me :)

The molding over my bedroom door - the kitchen side.

My bedroom door from the inside. Fancy pants.



The trim around the window in the office.



The doors and windows that I know how to trim have been trimmed, and now I’m waiting for my knowledgeable reinforcements for guidance on the pocket doors and longer window “tops” to match the molding over the doors.

Aside from that, we vented the dryer and I did my first FULL load of laundry in the house. It was a very successful first run, and very nice to not have to lug a bag of clothes to a laundry far, far away. I’m also having a water softener installed. Water softeners might be more of a Midwest thing: when you talk to people out East, they kind of look at you funny. Because of the mineral content in the water here and the damage it can do to faucets and water heaters – not to mention how dry it makes your skin in the middle of winter – it’s a nice thing to have.

Otherwise, I’ve been nurturing my little Wal-Mart plants, testing out my new toaster, and getting my things organized.

And eating dinner, of course..

The garage has been taken over by sawdust and lumber again for the trim projects, so I have had to scrape the ice off my windshield in the mornings before work, but I can deal with that.

IKEA finally came through for me! BOTH lights hanging in the dining room!

The register covers I got for the hardwood floors. They have a brushed finish that doesn't come across in this picture, but I think they look pretty alright.

Things are coming along – trim isn’t as big a deal as I had made it out to be. Once the doors are finished up, we can start on the baseboard.. I bought all kinds of lumber last weekend for that project, and I’m excited to get started. What a difference THAT will make!