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Tag Archives: man help

Camping out in my Own Townhouse

13 Sunday Oct 2013

Posted by fivenineteen in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ceiling, chili, football, frustration, home improvement, home projects, huskies, joy, man help, movies, paint, popcorn ceiling, progress, seahawks, slow cooking, townhouse

AKA…”celebrating” a decade (errr, now almost 11 years, eesh) in the townhouse.  Part trois.

Remember when this first got started?  If not, feel free to peruse here.  Yes, it was February 2012…Super Bowl Sunday actually.  Man oh man, what a journey it’s been.  And I think a “fuck this shitty goddamn mess of a ceiling already” was one of the outbursts along the way.  And then things with the ceiling work went dark. And, thank goodness, it will resume on Tuesday.

This project has been so goddamned delayed it’s turned into a punch line.  Co-workers, friends, even my hairdresser and manicurist ask every time I see them how “that ceiling project” is coming along.  I just have to laugh off all the delays.  It was way more than I could chew and while the Man Help early on meant well, between schedules and the workload/skills involved it was way over our heads.

Now…squee!  This week my plumber, R, will pick up where he left off this week, getting my bedroom, master vanity and the walk-in closet all finished up.  THEN it’s time to paint.  This is exactly the motivator I’ve needed to do lots of things:  get the walls repainted (I love the bright turquoise walls, but the green I chose for the others in the big open space is too minty next to the bright blue and never quite felt right.  I may just cover it all up with a nice, rich taupe.  I have some beautiful giclee prints of outdoor Mediterranean café scenes in gorgeous wood frames that I purchased.  In 2005.  And never hung on the wall due to wanting to repaint the mint green wall prior.  Errgh…am I the only who takes YEARS to get silly projects like this done?

J was amazing getting me motivated and helped out this weekend, and it’s wonderful to tell and show him how appreciated he is.  But first, we had to relax on Saturday!  Ugh, U of W Huskies had a tough loss to Oregon, but we enjoyed watching the game at a local sports bar in walking distance from my house.  Indulging in a pitcher of Mac & Jack’s on a beautiful, sunny fall day…hey, why not?  It’s football season, after all!  We then made yummy chili in the crock pot…ground turkey, grilled chicken breasts, black beans, garlic, spices onions and tomatoes.  Fantastic…and spot on healthy “comfort food.”

Then we saw Gravity in 3D on Saturday night.  If you haven’t already seen it, RUN don’t walk and see it on the big screen.  For this movie it’s an absolute must.  Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are fantastic together.  All thumbs up!

Today we tackled the not-so-fun chore of getting my bedroom cleared out for the ceiling work.  Moving my box spring and mattress and dismantling the wrought iron frame and getting it around tight corners to the spare 3rd bedroom (also on the upper level) was not fun but WE DID IT!  Now I’ll be camped out in that room for I’m guessing at least a week, depending on how long it takes R to finish the ceiling scraping, mudding and texturing and for J’s schedule to help me get everything back in the bedroom.  Which we’ll probably paint prior to that…

I’m so glad I’d already spent a bunch of time clearing out my walk-in closet.  It’s not super big, but it does hold a ton (and could use a major California Closets-like update to replace the single hanger bar around all sides.  There was a lot more cleaning out to do and J and I chuckled at how much stuff I’ve accumulated.  Trust me, I didn’t used to be this way!  I moved a ton of clothes downstairs save for what I’ll need for work and the gym this week.  And I have a MAJOR clean out project now of sorting through all of these clothes…what should I keep?  What’s in a smaller size I might be back in someday soon…and hopefully still in style to keep wearing?  What’s a definite tosser?  More to follow on that.

So over brunch and an ugly game but a win by the Seahawks, it was another glorious day.  I savor the fall sunshine, for soon the rains and chilly winds will kick in.  But I love the sensuality of the changing seasons.

I’m feeling happy, blessed and content.  This home improvement work WILL happen…and the ceilings are just the beginning.

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Celebrating a Decade in the Townhouse – the Belated Sequel

07 Sunday Apr 2013

Posted by fivenineteen in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

ceiling, garage, hero, home projects, man help, spontaniety

garage2013Way, way back in early February 2012, Super Bowl Sunday to be exact, L (my guy BFF) and I started scraping away at the thickly painted over popcorn ceiling that permeates my entire townhouse save for the bathrooms and kitchen.  Little did we know how overwhelmed we would get with the work, and how our schedules would start drifting further apart, making it hard to lock down times to keep a-scrapin’ away.  That shit comes down like wet, crumbly paper mache, so floor-to-ceiling taping, draping and making sure you wear shoes where you won’t mind stepping in it (because you inevitably will), and consciously remembering to take said shoes off before trotting around outside the work area are all absolute musts. Oh, you can imagine the nightmare of vacuuming up accidentally tracked ceiling goo in my stairway and into my living room and dining room.  Whoops!

Later in the year when our progress had ground to a barely started halt (while my upstairs remained noisy with oddly rearranged clutter everywhere, from books, nighstands, knickknacks and a large, disassembled bookcase) my longtime plumber, R, came to the rescue.  He was here with a guy from his crew replacing my garbage disposal (a hole had rusted through it), and I was making idle chitchat that I had this big, unfinished ceiling scraping project that was driving me nuts.  He lit up and said wow, can I come take a look at the progress?  I learned he’s taken down many popcorn ceilings, and knows exactly how to do the mudding and texture after the scraping is done to get it looking finished, not just scraped.

Fast forward a few months (and the security of job income for the next few months), R and R finished up one of my bedrooms this past week!  Their idea was to just focus on one room at a time to get it completely done.  That way I would be able to move clutter from my other rooms into the finished room, plus other stuff when it came time to empty out another room.  A big, slow-moving shell game.

This week, the small 3rd bedroom at the top of my stairway got completely finished, complete with a great-looking caulking job along the edges of the ceiling.  This will make painting so much easier!  Eventually the room will be a guest room; it’s too small to hold a queen-sized bed comfortably, but a full-sized Murphy style bed would be ideal, so the floor space wouldn’t be constantly gobbled up.

Never in my LIFE have I squealed with delight over a freakin’ CEILING!  Wooohooooo!!  It looks ten bajillion times better, and those old-school 8-foot ceilings look even taller now.  I’ll be writing some big checks over the next few months as we get more rooms cleaned up, but this will pay itself back many times over.  R does great work and I’m blessed to have his help with so many fix-it projects!

And now…Exhibit B:  my garage!  Maybe it’s my extra X chromosome or I don’t know what, but I really never gave two shakes about my garage.  Sure, it’s considered oversized compared to many townhomes these days and easily holds two cars, but I never really focused any attention on it when I moved in…in 2002.  And the clutter started piling up…on the concrete floors.  I knew I needed shelving and some storage solutions, but either got overwhelmed with the choices, or just shifted my focus to the main living areas, choosing new window treatments and painting.  My hockey gear bag would sit on the floor, opened to keep it aired out (thank goodness for the garage as hockey gear reeks), and other clutter like paint cans, painting equipment, planter boxes, cleaning supplies, boxes of old college textbooks and you name it just sat around on the floor in there for years.

Maybe I was too embarrassed to ask for help.  Yes, I think at times I was.  Water started seeping through small cracks in the far concrete wall…and in a warped way I was embarrassed about that!  And maybe a little freaked out at what that would mean – is my foundation getting damaged as a result?  Where are the drainage problems coming from?  Who do I turn to for help?  Why am I having these problems…I don’t have time for this!  Ugh, sometimes I hate home ownership!  Anytime I had a repair guy down in my garage working on the furnace I’d always apologize for how messy the garage looked.  Most of the time they would say something like “Ma’am, you have no idea…yours is immaculate compared to what we see.”  I guess I turned a blind eye to the mess and just got used to how it looked.

Thanks to J’s heroic help, all of this is changing…for the better!!  Over the past few weeks he’s been hauling away crap I don’t need anymore.  What a great feeling!  And last night we went to Home Depot to look for shelving, large plastic storage bins, a new furnace filter and some concrete patching mix.  Home Depot on a Saturday night is a fun experience.  I personally like it because it’s not nearly as crowded as a Saturday afternoon, but sometimes it can be harder to find someone to help.  J knows his way around a Home Depot and isn’t shy about speaking up and asking for help finding something or asking how to do something.  It’s an extremely comforting feeling being with someone who knows the right questions to ask.

When we got back to my place we started clearing away more clutter, changed my furnace filter, and assembled the new steel shelving unit that gloriously gets so much of my stuff off the garage floor and organized!  Yahoo!  J even painted the alcove where we put the shelving a bright white (much better than the yellow-ish unfinished sheet rock), and we’re going to get some lighting installed in there too.

By the time we were finished, it was after midnight!  And I’d rediscovered so much crap that had been sitting in bins, boxes or – gasp – loose all over my garage floor.  High school yearbooks.  Gardening equipment.  Cleaning supplies and unused scrub brushes.  Plastic deck chairs that needed hosing down.  And…my Grandmother’s wedding china (from 1940)!  It’s been all boxed up and tucked away down there for years.  And it’s a beautiful pink floral pattern…while it might be fun to get it displayed in my living room somehow, it’s just not my style.  Honestly, I will probably sell it.

J was most thrilled by discovering that I actually DO have a barbecue…a small, portable Weber that had been buried under God Knows What.  We were all up for doing a spontaneous midnight barbecue on my back deck, but the deck is uncovered and it was raining.  Oh well, we’ll do that next time.  Instead, we toasted our progress with a couple of beers and went to bed.  J made us a great egg scramble for breakfast with bacon, scallions, mushrooms and garlic. I rarely have let others take the lead in my kitchen to be honest, but J knows his way around and cooks like I do, making minimal mess.

This rainy weekend was quite a contrast from the gorgeous sunny weather last week, but it sure was just as happy and fulfilling!

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Gallery

Celebrating a Decade in the Townhouse

05 Sunday Feb 2012

Posted by fivenineteen in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

broil, charred, Dump Run, hockey, improve, lighting, man help, paint, pizza, popcorn ceiling, scrape, townhouse

This gallery contains 8 photos.

OK, here we go!   The journey to update this vintage 1980 townhouse is in full swing!  And not without a …

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Exciting Changes

29 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by fivenineteen in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

change, design, domain, internet, layout, man help, moving, projects, Saturday, twitter

I felt compelled to put my (likely) last Blogspot post over here on fivenineteen.org too.  Continuity and all I guess.   Here it is!  (Ummm, OK so the date shows this was posted on Jan 29th but it is Jan 28th right now so we did a leap into the future looks like.  Actually that was my bad; I had the wrong time zone selected on the back end here.  Learning, learning.  All other posts should have an accurate date stamp!)

Know that feeling when you’re right on the brink of pulling the trigger on something new?  You may or may not have it all planned out but you probably have an idea of how you want things to look whenever “it” is done?

I’m not quite there yet, but I’m on my way.  And (but) the train is rolling, so no turning back.

What’s going on here?  Well, Dearest Followers and Readers, I’ve purchased a tiny piece of the Internet.  Fivenineteen.org.  Nope, no hyphens (yay!).

What this means is that this is likely one of the last new posts I will do on Blogspot.  I’ll continue weekly postings here on fivenineteen.org. 

Whew!  I’ve ported over all of my posts here from Day One over to the new site as well – thankfully much easier than I thought.  Please, please, check out my new work in progress here on fivenineteen.org!  And please pardon the dust as well, as I am learning the ropes on how to lay out this new site, choose graphics and get everything looking the way I want it.  The post pictures are kind of jacked up right now (all squooshed to the side), but I’ll get it straightened out eventually. 

Want to know a little secret?  One of my favorite parts of the Blogspot site is the side bar showing where hits come from.  It’s absolutely fascinating to me!  From countless places around the States to the UK, China, Australia, Maldives, Malta, Romania and Brazil – and so many other countries too.  I just love it.  And I hope I can replicate something similar here too – stay tuned. 

Right now I am debating whether to add my Twitter feed here, but I’m not sure I want it there.  And don’t laugh, because in adding Twitter I realized just how seldom I tweet.  So that might change too.  Follow me @five19 and see what happens.  Huge thanks to my dear friend P, who shared a bunch of great tips on site layout, adding pictures and replicating what I have here over on fivenineteen.org.  I’ve got a great to-do list for sure thanks to her.

And in other Change News, I’ve got yet another list – thanks to my guy BFF L – of a whole bunch of home improvement projects he is going to help me with.  First things first, a run (or two?) to the Dump.  This all starts tomorrow, which is why I’m blogging today on a Saturday instead of my usual Sunday (yes, I know it says Sunday; wrong time zone issue which is now fixed).  I have no idea how crazy tomorrow is going to be but I know once we get started I’m going to be really excited and on a roll.  It’s always that first step that’s the hardest, don’t you think?  Having great friends willing to help and provide ideas is the grease in my gears.  Sometimes my lists get so long I lose the prioritizing skill and PLOP.  Nothing gets done.  I get wiggy and overwhelmed.  And I’ve forewarned L I likely will along the way.  He has great ideas, and (but) he and I have very different tastes in decorating.  So this is going to be amusing and interesting.  But he knows whose name is on the title to the townhouse here, so we’re all good there.  (Meaning, mine).

So the Man Help is on the way tomorrow, and meanwhile I’ve got a ton to do to prepare today, plus get stuff for the tacos we’re going to make.  And I have a super late hockey game tomorrow night too.  Can I get a second or third wind to skate hard?

Lots more to come – and probably pictures too – as the home projects get underway.  Remember, check out fivenineteen.org here for more posts.  And if you follow me at Blogspot, why not follow me on my new site here too?  I’d be most grateful.  Yeah, I don’t care for self-promotion but there ya go – I said it outloud and most humbly.

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