Archive for 2010

It may come to blows…

Thursday, May 27th, 2010

The one thing I abhor more than anything else in a home (and trust me if I come to your place, I will notice) is ugly tangled messy electronics. HATE FOR THIS. Boiling seething hate. The Boy and I have come to a number impasses over this “electronics” issue over the eight years we’ve been together. It’s been a consistent issue raised, but never resolved.

This particularly new electronic stereo mess has been sitting in the living room for a few months and I’m at about the point were I start to completely loose patience and stare at it with seething fury every time I walk by. The cords, the CORDS, all those messy cords…

I’m trying really hard not to be an asshole about it. Really, really hard. I understand that my role in the relationship is to be a complete freak about the aesthetic side of our lives, but he’s not willing to hide it and I’m not willing to look at it. No compromise is forthcoming so it looks like we got ourselves a stalemate.

My question for you is this:

How do you battle out those kind of decor issues with your significant other? What is your decorating snapping point?

*P.S. On the prettier side of things, I think I found a spot for the new spider table.

**P.S.S. I think I win though, cause come on. CD’s? What is this the stone age?

FILED UNDER: decorating, living, question, readers

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Windows

Wednesday, May 26th, 2010

Long before we even started priming the house The Boy took a good long chunk of time to restore the rotten and decrepit window sills. He sanded, patched and primed the wood long before we decided on a house color…well, except for two. There are two windows left on the garage that haven’t gotten the restoration treatment (somewhat luckily since I never got a good “before” image of the untouched sills).

Yes, they were all this crappy.

This weekend was the first time I got to paint over the primer and check out our fully restored sills. It’s been about a year and a half long process to get to this point, but its probably been over 50 years since they were first painted. During all that time since the house was first built it seems like no one ever thought to give them a second coat of paint. There was only one thin off-white coat of paint that was just completely flaking off. Probably better than having to sand down years worth of gloppy paint jobs.

We did recently hear from a neighbor that The Brick House used to be a halfway house for a good long while. Awesome. Go Hemet!

Now what to do about those crappy aluminum windows…

FILED UNDER: after, before, exterior, windows

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Painting continued

Tuesday, May 25th, 2010

Still painting. Well, not in the storm. But you know what I mean.

What I thought we could tackle in a week or so (good god I was naive) looks like it may turn into a month or two of exterior painting. DAMMIT.

It’s turned out that painting under the eaves is probably the seventh circle of hell. It is the most tortuous sustained body movement with your arms above your head and your lower back / shoulders aching while looking directly into the sun (plus I got giant chunks of paint stuck in my long luxurious mousy brown hair) AND it needs two, possibly three coats of paint. So you have to keep going back to this awful quagmire of hell torture even though you know the pain will come. Oh, and it comes.

Looks like every surface, even though we primed, is going to need two to three coats of paint. The two of us are painting the whole Brick House compound not once, not twice, but three times.

Saturday, after four hours of repainting walls and painting under long stretches of eaves, I kind of lost my mind and thought “We could just hire some people to finish this. We could just give up and get some help. Painting is the devil.”

Maybe it’s a good thing that we took a break on Sunday. The poor Boy has to continue painting all week by himself while I’m at work.

We still need to re-mortar this little chunk of the brick planter. It fell apart sometime over the years and needs to be chiseled down, stacked and cemented together before we paint it up.

The stupid chimney. This is far as I could reach on top of a ladder with an extension stick on my roller. Pathetic. We need to figure out how to get some paint on there. Three coats of paint.

The Boy did finish sanding and patching the last of the fascia on Saturday as I went totally insane painting under the eaves. So that’s a plus. Now we can just repaint it over and over and over and over and over and over…

FILED UNDER: before, exterior

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