A Squirrel’s Room*: Part 1

We have LESS THAN FOUR THREE MONTHS until the arrival of our (we’re 95% sure) daughter. This might sound like plenty of time to get things ready, but it’s taken us until now to take the baby’s room from Man Cave/Pitch-It-In Room:

to Nursery in Progress:

Obviously, we need to pick up the pace a little.

Our house’s former owners left it in pretty good shape, but they did do some “maintenance” that was obviously intended to cover up problems rather than solve them, and thereby made more work for us than there would have been if they’d just left things how they were to begin with. One such hack job is the touch-up paint they slapped on the baseboards and trim in several of the rooms. Not only was the color ever-so-slightly mismatched from the underlying hue, but it was bubbling and peeling and generally driving me insane whenever I looked at it.

Look! Isn’t it HORRIBLE?

Trust me, it looked much worse in person than mere photos can convey.

We’ve left it this way in most of the house, since we were trying to paint almost all the rooms before moving in and didn’t have a whole lot of time to fix the nitty-gritty. But as we started getting ready to paint the nursery, my detail-oriented little brain kept piping up “If you’re going to do something, do it right!” Also, I was having visions of the baby creeping around rubbing strips of pigment off the baseboards and eating them, and I KNOW it’s not lead-based, but that shit cannot be good for a nine-month-old. So: sanding and painting baseboards! Yay!

Since it’s an irregular surface, at first I thought I’d have to hand-sand my way around the room. Then I tried it for twenty minutes and decided, “Fuck that noise,” and got out my trusty Mouse sander, which has deh-heh-HEH-finitely been well worth forty bucks. Even more so after this project.

A few hours later, the baseboards looked like this:

Much better! Not nearly so peeling-paint-y.

So how do you paint baseboards (after wiping off the sanding dust with a damp cloth, of course) without getting the carpets all messy, you ask? Very carefully. Actually, if you’re a lazy redecorator like me, not that carefully: you just get a longish, narrowish piece of cardboard to hold between the bottom of the baseboard and the carpet as you move around the room, like so:

Make sure you paint several thin coats (rather than one or two thick ones) so drips won’t be an issue. I did three coats, with 30-60 minutes of drying time between each. A fourth coat wouldn’t have hurt, but I was very ready to stop painting. These days when my body tells me it’s ready to stop doing something, I stop.

The much-improved result:

Next up: Ceiling! And walls! We’ve done this before.

* When we were starting to announce the pregnancy to friends, Sean joked to them that either I was pregnant, or I’d swallowed a squirrel and it was moving around inside of me.

 

Scenes from the commute.

After last week’s rant I thought I should do a more positive (and less profanity-laced) post about biking to work. Along with aggressive drivers and exhaust fumes, there are many beautiful things on the route. To wit:

Cold mornings make pretty sunrises.

Rocinante and Dapple have retired to the 'burbs.

Secret route to the lake.

Greenhouses.

A gloomy sky makes McDonald's look inviting.

Breathing a sigh of relief after turning into a quiet neighborhood.

Bridge over the freeway.

 

My partially-handmade Christmas

Okay, so it’s February. Christmas was two months ago. But who doesn’t like a little midwinter inspiration? A big Scrooge, that’s who.

Most years, I do my holiday gift-giving using a mixture of online shopping, panicked eleventh-hour trips to Target, and making by hand things that I (a) have time for, and (b) think I can make by hand without them looking like a second-grader’s art-class project.

My dad has been getting back into gardening, so I made him a set of garden stakes: you know, those things you stick in the dirt at the end of a row of seeds so you know what’s growing (or not growing, as the case may be) there. Behold:

These started life as a set of Formica samples the countertop guy gave us when we replaced our kitchen counters. Apparently he did not want them back, and now I only have approximately 9,886 more laminate rectangles to figure out what to do with.

The thing is, paint doesn’t stick to laminate so well, so even though I primed the samples before painting them, it scratches off very easily (particularly when using dark-colored paint).

The problem wasn’t as noticeable with this light green. I primed and painted the samples on both sides, using two coats of latex I had left over from paint samples. I then drew pretty words and pictures on them with metallic Sharpie pens.

Other materials:

• Wooden dowels, cut into 12-inch lengths, sanded and painted
• Hooks and eyes, screwed into one end of each dowel (the package I bought just included the “eye” parts, but it was still labeled “hooks and eyes”)
• Jewelry-making wire to attach the tags to the dowels

Since I already had most of the materials, I think this little project came in under $5, and a few hours of work.

Garden stakes all wrapped and ready to go.

My other handmade gift was “commissioned” by my sister’s boyfriend T. He’d seen and liked some of my paintings when he was down for the wedding, so he asked if I’d do him something with red and beige to go with his living room. Sure! I said, little knowing that I wouldn’t have time for over a year. But! Better late than never.

I decided on the Mackinac Bridge as a subject, since T lives in Michigan and I grew up doing the Labor Day bridge walk every year, so it’s dear to my heart. The Mackinac Bridge has neither red nor beige in it, you say? Pish, I reply. Artistic license, baby. Since it had to travel in a suitcase and big canvases are expensive, even in thrift stores, I painted a diptych (that’s a fancy painterly word that means two paintings that go together).

The Mackinac Bridge, on the day the skies turn to bloooood.

Now, I am not a trained artist (“No shit,” says anyone who knows anything about painting. Or possibly anyone who has ever seen a painting). But T. loved his gift. LOVED. IT. Or he did a very good job of pretending he did. So I’ll count it as a success.

This one came in at around $25, for the canvases (sad little paintings abandoned at the Salvation Army), replenishing my paint supply, and buying a couple of itty bitty brushes. Which I will use again, when I do another painting in three years.

 

I’m'a cut a bitch

Gainesville is a pretty bike-friendly place. Many, many routes have bike lanes; you can hardly throw a rock without hitting a bike shop; only rarely do you read about a cyclist being killed.

However. (Warning: a certain amount of self-righteous whining appears below.)

There are certain elements of the motoristic persuasion who seem to feel that everyone should just get the eff out of their way, because they are Jack Bauer or some shit and the terrorists will explode a bomb at the mall if they (the Bauers, not the terrorists) are forced to travel at a mile per hour below the speed limit for even a minute. We all know about these people, because their obnoxious and honk-y ire is not confined to bicyclists.

It’s just a little bit more annoying (not to mention scarier) when you happen to not be surrounded by a two-ton steel cage and someone edges their two-ton steel cage past you barely a foot away and then has the nerve to HONK AT YOU. I’m sorry, was I KEEPING YOU FROM GOING SOMEWHERE?

When this happened to me on my commute home today, I was more angry than frightened, and angry in a long-suffering way: people are going to be jerks, and when you’re one of the few people riding down a busy road on a bike you might as well have one of those neon vests on, but instead of ONE LESS CAR it says PLEASE BULLY ME.

Look, we all hate being stuck behind cyclists; I drive, I know this. They are slow and if you aren’t an asshole, you’re worried about hitting them. But: like Mondays and American Idol, it happens. SUCK IT UP.

That is all.

 

Homemade Granola Bars: Not Just For Dirty Hippies Anymore!

Granola bars are the perfect food. They’re portable. They’re convenient. If you get the right kind, they’re not messy. You can eat one while also driving and trying to find a song you like on your iPod. On days when you’re cranky and hungry and wish they would just hurry up with the damn NutriPill^TM already so you don’t have to crawl down to the vending machine for elevensies, guess what: granola bar = NutriPill. Pretty much.

Except, not really. I’m fond of Nature Valley chewies, because they are yummy, and if you don’t actually look at the ingredients list you can convince yourself that they’re sort of healthy. DON’T LOOK AT THE INGREDIENTS LIST!

So. In an effort to make a snack that is not basically a crumblier candy bar, I’ve been cobbling together various recipes I’ve found on the interwebs, with decidedly mixed results. However, the most recent batch I made is quite tasty and holds its bar form fairly well.  The recipe uses honey and almond meal as sweeteners rather than sugar or corn syrup, but disclaimer: it ain’t low fat.

Ingredients

Ingredients.

• 4 cups rolled oats (old-fashioned, not quick cooking)
• 1 cup roasted wheat germ (available in the bulk food section of your local schmancy – or crunchy – supermarket)
• 1/2 cup sunflower seeds
• 1/2 cup sesame seeds
• 1 cup nuts (almonds, peanuts, mixed nuts, whatever looks good)
• 1 cup dried fruit (I usually use Craisins, but any kind will be good)
• 3/4 cup almond meal (my MIL had this in the kitchen, and since the packaging is in Chinese I assume she gets it at the Asian grocery. Alternatively, you could probably use a few tsp of almond extract)


Almond meal.

• 1 pinch salt
• 1/2 cup vegetable oil (or 1/4 cup oil and 1/4 cup applesauce)
• 1/2 cup honey
• 3/4 cup peanut butter

Just in case you weren't aware of how to get the last bit of something out of a jar.

Preparation

• Stir dry ingredients and fruit together in a large bowl.
• Add vegetable oil and honey. Swirl the vegetable oil around in a 1-cup measuring cup before you add it to the bowl, and measure the honey using the same cup. This will keep the honey from sticking to the cup.
• Add peanut butter.
• Recipe can be adjusted to your liking. Add coconut; leave out the wheat germ; use double the peanut butter. Go crazy.
• With clean hands, mix everything together until it’s…mixed.
• Lightly grease a roasting pan or cookie sheet. Using a spatula, press granola into the pan until it’s firmly stuck together in a flat sheet. It will probably not fill the entire pan.


Granola mixture pressed into roasting pan.

• For chewy bars, cook at 250 degrees for 40 minutes. For crispy bars, cook for 60 or 70 minutes. (The whole “preheat the oven” thing is bullshit, by the way. Every oven is different, so your cooking time will be trial-and-error anyway: why waste energy? I turn on the oven as I put the pan in, and keep the pan in there as the oven cools after cooking time is done.)
• Take the pan out of the oven and allow to cool. Cut into bars. Wonder if you are actually saving money by doing this. Eh, sure you are. And they’re healthy(ish), right? Right.
• Store in an airtight container in the refrigerator for up to… a few weeks? I’ve never had them last long enough to get stale.

These probably aren’t crumb-free enough to eat in the car, but bring a few of them in a Tupperware container and they make good midday snacks for work or school.

 

In my private theater, nobody accepts a cell phone call without losing a finger

Sure, it's comfy. But is it worth THE BREAKDOWN OF OUR COLLECTIVE CULTURE? HMMM?

A couple of weeks ago I caught a story on NPR about how fewer Americans are going to the movies, choosing instead to cocoon themselves with their pirated films and home theater systems, and how film distributors are responding (a little more forward-thinkingly than the RIAA, apparently). I’m fairly skeptical of “trend watch” items, but I’m stingy enough to bring my own candy to the multiplex. So the prospect of having a wider selection of movies (a-HEM, streaming Netflix)to watch at home  is fairly thrilling.

Still, I can’t help but think it would be sad if the movie theater did go the way of the record store. I wouldn’t be sorry to say goodbye to $10 popcorn or the lunkhead in the next row answering her cell phone. But no matter how big your TV is, you miss something when the only way you watch movies is in your living room, with a few people you know well.

This is where an illustrative anecdote would come in handy–and what do you know, I’ve got one

Not as much fun at home.

I saw The Blair Witch Project on its opening night. This was before the spoilers, before the parodies and the unfortunate spin-offs and sequels. People were excited about this movie. The theater was packed.

Anyone who isn’t a complete asshat is generally quietish when watching films in public, but the silence in that theater during the next hour and a half was the stillness of five hundred people forgetting to breathe. Every pair of eyes was locked on the screen as if something would come out of it and get us if we looked away. We all had the bejesus scared out of us, and it was heightened because we were having a collective experience in a big room full of strangers.

Friends who saw Blair Witch in the following weeks told me they didn’t know what the hype was about. They’d heard too much about the movie. Other people in the theater were doing their normal movie-theater thing, fidgeting and whispering and rustling popcorn bags. The spell had been broken.

Even when the movie isn’t completely riveting, though, there’s something about laughing/gasping/groaning at the funny/scary/stupid/gross parts with a bunch of people you don’t know. Even the hell-is-other-people aspects of going to the movies have a purpose: they teach you how to endure bullshit, and how to decide when the line’s been crossed and it’s time to get the usher (or throw popcorn at a bitch).

Does this have societal implications beyond conditioning us to the idea that movies as well as music should be free? Maybe. I do think that having one more opportunity to wall oneself off from the unwashed masses won’t contribute much to increased empathy and goodwill toward fellow humans. Then again, maybe it will: it’s easier to contemplate paying more taxes for universal health care when you aren’t thinking it’s going to benefit the aging delinquent who was putting his feet up on your seat during 2012.

 

My new favorite blog: Girls and Bicycles

OK, so it sounds like a Penthouse spread, but it’s really the blog of the inspirational Sarah Chan, AKA Miss Sarah. This well-named young woman is a piano teacher from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, who rides her bike everywhere. Her blog encompasses the various adventures she has on her various bicycles and the various cute outfits she wears while riding said bikes (wow, I really need to retire the word “various” now).

Miss Sarah writes in a down-to-earth and engaging way about her family and friends, daily errands, spots she likes around Edmonton and its environs, pregnancy (I found her blog while searching for “biking while pregnant”), and, of course, bicycles. She totally geeks out, but not in an insular I-only-ride-fixies way (she’s a fan of the Euro-style city bikes).

I’m jealous of her pricey velocipedary stable, but I can’t get too full of bile over someone with such a laid-back attitude toward her lifestyle. Miss Sarah doesn’t consider her way The Only Right Way, even though she’s obviously working from strongly held values: She and her husband lead a nearly car-free life (with a newborn, even), often putting themselves to what must seem like significant (and unnecessary) inconvenience to someone used to driving exclusively. But there’s no judgy vibe. Advocates of sustainable transportation and car-free living often get stereotyped as strident and self-righteous, but like this girl they tend to be a pretty live-and-let-live lot.  Of course there are some glaring exceptions: I’m thinking of a few regular posters on a bike forum I frequent, who do things like contemptuously referring to motorists as “cagers” and the helmet-free as “airheads.” It’s a shame that these douchebags turn people off bicycling as being a macho, rule-bound activity, so it’s nice to read someone who’s like, Hey! We’re not all assholes! And some of us even have fashion sense!

 

If you bought me a 1995 Château Margaux, I would now have a place to store it

I know f**k all about wine. I usually choose my vintage based on looks and price (the other day I had a nice $8.99 Malbec with a very pretty tree on the label). I got the title for this post by Googling “expensive wine.” Still, I do enjoy a glass or five now and then, and wine bottles get dusty when you store them on the floor.

In our dining room, the china/liquor/dog food (yep.) cabinet forms an alcove that’s the perfect size for this Craigslist find.

Between sanding and painting, looking pretty much like it did when I bought it.

It was a built-in kitchen fixture that the seller discarded when she redid her kitchen, so the material (laminate on plywood) isn’t the best quality, and it had several holes from where it was attached to the other cabinetry.

A little paint, though, will do wonders. Painting laminate requires some preparation to make sure the paint doesn’t lift. The process:

1. First, I sanded the piece down with my trusty Mouse sander (wearing goggles and a respirator, of course—safety first, kids!). I tried to remove as much of the shiny finish as possible, and used the detail attachments on the lattice and other small planes.
2. I filled in the most visible holes with wood filler. The cabinet is nailed together and I didn’t want to have to take it apart and put it back together, so I left some less accessible holes in the back panel as they were (they’ll be covered up by wine bottles anyway).
3. After giving the wood filler a day or so to cure, I hand-sanded the areas like the directions said. After a few dozen strokes I got tired of this and fired up the Mouse again. Nobody died.
4. Then it was time to prime (actually, it was time to wipe and vacuum away the sanding dust. THEN it was time to prime). I used an oil-based primer, which supposedly provides a smoother and more durable finish than latex primers, but is more of a pain to work with and clean up. Whatever flavor of primer you use, though, it is essential when painting a slick surface like laminate: it gives the paint something to stick to, without which it would peel right off (I know this from sad personal experience).
5. After priming, I was just a couple of coats of semi-gloss latex and a few days of drying time away from storage for an entire case of wine, should I ever be so lucky as to own one (heh). I used some off-white trim paint I had lying around. I used a four-inch roller with a medium-quality half-inch nap foam cover wherever there was room for one to maneuver, and this gave me a nice, smooth finish.

Ta-dah!

Those four bottles look a bit lonely, no?

Other than the obvious “more wine,” I think the wall above the wine rack needs something: a shadow box? a sconce? Definitely something three-dimensional.

Materials and Costs

• Cabinet: $5 (Craigslist)
• Wood filler: $3
• Primer: $10 (with plenty left over for future projects)
• Paint: $0 (already had it)

 

Screw Handcraft, Give Me Power Tools Any Day

I’ve been feeling awfully lazy during the past couple of months. Trashy novels and summer and fall TV are partly to blame, but lately it also seems like the minutiae of life are expanding to fit my available free time, and I just can’t get around to half the projects bubbling away on my back burner.

However, the arrival of lovely, lovely fall has me thinking about using my garage for more than storage. I’ve got dining-room chairs that need to be repainted and recovered. I’ve got a $5 Craigslisted laminate wine cabinet that will eventually coordinate with the dining-room chairs. I’ve got a woefully under-landscaped yard and an appalling lack of fresh herbs growing in my nonexistent garden. (And yes, I know it’s fall. By the time I’m ready to grow the garden, it’ll be spring.) Yes, friends, it’s list-making season. But not only that: it’s list-item-crossing-off season.

To that end, I’ve spent a few days prepping for something that’s been on my list for months: painting the master bathroom, which has has been put off. And put off. Until now.

My plans for the space are a topic for another day (mostly because said plans are still pretty fuzzy), so I’m just going to sing the praises of my new best friend: the Black & Decker Mouse sander.

As any seasoned home improver knows, painting is 90% preparation and 10% satisfaction (okay, 5% satisfaction and 5% accidentally getting paint on the ceiling and swearing). Unless you like the look of cracks and bumps in your freshly painted walls, you’ve got to get friendly with the spackle and sandpaper before you whip out the roller. Being in a rather moist area, our bathroom walls started out in rougher shape than those in the rest of the house, so we’ve done some relatively extensive drywall patching… which necessitates relatively extensive sanding. With a plethora of refinishing projects on the horizon and an increasing tendency to procrastinate less-than-fun jobs, I decided that buying a sander was the best way to git-r-dun.

And git-r-dun I have (at least to the level of doneness appropriate for a room that no one besides Sean and I will ever see). I’m used to gutting it out with the sanding block, so it was a little shocking to turn on the Mouse and watch a roughly plastered spot that would have taken five or ten minutes by hand magically turn silky-smooth in about eight seconds.

As its name suggests, the Mouse is teensy, so it’s not for heavy-duty projects or large areas. However, the price ($39.99) is right, and it comes with a few detailing attachments that make it versatile enough for most small homeowner-y jobs. It has a dust collection attachment that works quite well, too. Of course, it does require specialized sanding pads, and for some reason my Home Depot stocks only extra-fine and extra-coarse grits—but that’s what the interwebs are for. In a pinch, it’s easy to use standard sandpaper:

1. Take a worn Mouse pad and trace its shape (including the location of the holes) on the back of a sheet of sandpaper in your desired grit.
2. Cut out the sandpaper. Poke holes with pen or screwdriver.
3. Secure to worn pad with little nibbets of duct or double-sided tape.
4. Sand.
5. Laugh at The Man and His attempts to fence you in with proprietary power tool accessories.

This hack makes for less even sanding and the sandpaper wears out fairly quickly, but it works.

 

Taming the Garage: Update

Seven months later, I’d call the garage a success:

 

We have only the tiniest of Garage Piles, and we can store a vehicle! In the garage! Along with lots of other stuff! And still have room left over! I am happy about this.

The actual floor plan we ended up with:

The final(ish) result is something of an evolution of my original floor plan, what with actual objects behaving differently from little boxes on a diagram, and the need to get to the fridge without tripping over the minivan. One good surprise handed down by the reality gods was the outlet on the ceiling for the garage door opener, which allowed us to put the refrigerator right outside the door to the kitchen and plug it in with the help of an extension cord and a few hammer-in cable brackets.

Our expenditures weren’t huge. I picked up three chrome shelving from Target at $39.99 apiece, which seem pretty sturdy and weren’t too difficult to put together. (I did one by myself, and two with help from the BIL; I think it was easier by myself!) I secured them to studs with pipe brackets (under a buck each) for extra safety. Two ladder hooks (screwed into studs in the wall) were around a dollar each at Home Depot.

I put together the bike rack using this tutorial and added a few strategically placed screws to function as hooks for gardening equipment and bike accessories. The materials (2×4, wood screws, bicycle hooks) were less than $10—a big improvement over most of the retail bike storage out there.

A baker’s rack we already had provides a countertop and does a great job of storing tools, with toolboxes and cases on the lower shelves and frequently used items hanging from S-hooks (mostly free, since we already had a bunch) above. The rest of the storage consists of odds and ends we had that don’t look very pretty, but keep things fairly organized: a plastic drawer unit, some containers and cardboard boxes with the lid flaps folded in, even drawers from an old refrigerator. Downcycle-o-riffic!