co-habitation at it's finest

   I acquired my house three and a half years ago at the age of twenty-two.  This was huge for me.  When all of my friends were renting, I had a place where I could put any color I wanted on the walls, pick out new tile or flooring, and completely make my own.  Through trial and error, I learned basic plumbing and electric skills.  I also learned that I am a control freak and that my younger brother, who had moved in with me from the start, was an excellent roommate (possibly because he saw me as the house matriarch and went along with my controlling ways).  I had three years to settle into My Way before my then-fiance moved in.  Turns out, I'm not very good at sharing my space.

  After a very tense month of Mo walking on eggshells and me taking the brunt of the housework, I realized that something needed to give... and that thing was me.  So one day when Mo was at work, I took on my bathroom and bedroom.  Two large bags of clothes for donation later, he had his own drawer in the bathroom and I had moved his side of the bed away from the wall and given him a nightstand and half of the closet.  I even moved his musical and recording equipment into the spare bedroom, turning it into a music room.  When I did that, I vowed to not be bothered if those spaces, his spaces, got a little messy and so far I have kept that promise.  The next weekend, I got Mo and my brother together and we reorganized the rest of the house.  We went through everything, consolidated our belongings and donating the things we had two of or had never used.  We comprised on where to rearrange the living room furniture and even bought a rug.  We also divided up chores and the house has maintained a level of clean and organized that trills me, especially since I'm no longer doing all the work.

   It's rarely easy when one half of the couple moves into a home that's been established by the other half.  The best way to overcome that, at least for me, was to embark on a sort of "spring cleaning" with my husband.  Through giving him his own space in the house, even space as little as a drawer, I realized I expressed to him that he is a welcome member of this house.  Through reorganizing the shared space, we both became more comfortable with sharing.  Though I still have final say in large projects around the house, it's become less "mine" and more "ours".  And once he realized he's welcome here for good, he became more than happy to help out around the house.  Our home, like our marriage, is a work in progress, but we're in it together and that's all that matters.

finding perfection in an imperfect floor

This is the only before pic I have of the kitchen.  You can see stains from two rooms over.  We had fun there, obviously, but I hated people to see the walls.


   "Uh, Shelly?"  My husband was slouching in an attempt to make himself appear smaller and giving me puppy dog eyes, a sure sign that he had picked up on my foul mood and was sure I wouldn't like what he was about to tell me.  "We're going to have to do a patchwork job with the flooring in the laundry room."
   "What?  Why?"  I exclaimed, jumping to my feet and rushing to the room in question, as though my fervor in the matter could make more vinyl flooring appear.  When I got there, though, my words surprised everyone.
   "I like it.  Let's do it."

   I had taken ownership of the house when I was twenty-two.  My parents owned it and were fed up with bad renters, so they agreed to let me take over the mortgage on the condition that I allow my younger brother to live with me.  I immediately started dreaming of all the possibilities this ancient, leaky, adobe house offered.  I would do all the work myself and then sit back and enjoy a cocktail while marveling over all I had accomplished.  By the time my husband moved in, almost three years after I had, I realized I had accomplished very little.  But my husbands constant mantra of "let's do it" renewed my dreams.  We discussed all the rooms of the house and decided to start with the kitchen and the laundry room - both in need of a coat or five of paint (thanks to those mystery stains that stubbornly remain as the paint around them is scrubbed off) and new flooring (the existing floor was peeling, cracked, and also resistant to scrubbing).  We decided on red for the kitchen walls and cappuccino for the laundry room, buying Behr (www.behr.com) brand paint with hopes that it would cover the stains and a rolled up sheet of black and white flooring that we were told would cover the kitchen and laundry room floors with enough left over for the bathroom.  I had images of myself in a tea-length dress, cooking dinner in my perfect kitchen with nary a hair out of place - I was going to be a tattooed June Cleaver.

  We started on a Thursday afternoon, moving all our large appliances into the living room.  The first upset was the realization that they didn't want us to disconnect our propane stove and we'd have to make do with jacks and having people lift it to get the flooring underneath.  We covered the stove with a tarp and got to painting the kitchen.  To my delight, the paint worked as advertised and it took a single coat to cover the stains that had taunted me.  We were off to a great start!  The next morning, we ripped up the flooring and discovered the second upset - a huge batch of mold where the old flooring had been peeling.  We saturated it with mold remover, which worked surprisingly well, and I moved on to painting the laundry room while the guys (my husband, our roommate, and a good friend) began laying the flooring in the kitchen. 


   By the time Saturday rolled around, we all had assumed we'd be done already and patience was wearing thin.  I was eager to remove the chaos from my living room and the boys were eager to just be done and get to playing video games.  Then we realized that through either a math error or a miscommunication with the gentleman who sold it to us, we had barely enough vinyl to finish the floor in the laundry room and most of it was in pieces.  And that's where this story started.



  This was our first DIY project.  It's not perfect, but neither are we.  When I look at that floor, I think about all the love that went into it.  I can't be June Cleaver - she never worked two jobs, never lived with her brother and a roommate in addition to her husband, and she certainly never indulged in DIY home improvement.  Maybe I'll become more like June Cleaver some day, but right now, I'm embracing the perfect imperfections of the life and home that I love, celebrating our new kitchen with brats, good beer, great company, and bad karaoke.

deck stuffs and more gardening whatnot

So my birthday was Saturday.  We did it up: went horseback riding, then had a party.  Our friend Rob made frog legs, alligator steaks, and crawfish in addition to collard greens, black eye peas, and beer and cheese soup.  All of it was delicious, and he matches our kitchen:

At any rate, we got a late wedding gift/birthday present of a $300 gift card to Home Depot.  We spent it in one day.  Sunday, we picked up vinyl (for the office), paint (for the office and lower bathroom), paint supplies, deck restore stuff, a hot pepper upside-down planter, four hot pepper plants, and two tomato plants.  I got the tomatoes in planters (a Mr. Stripey and a Black Prince) and the upside-down pepper thing up (with two tabasco and two habanero) on Monday.  The black prince and one habanero aren't doing too well, but we're trying to look on the bright side.

We got the deck done, though.  We stained the trim with the same stain we used on the picnic table and put the deck restore stuff down.  This stuff is awesome, it hardened and created an interesting texture, but it rained last night and it held up to that (after we put it on about 8 hours prior).

Here's the finished product, thanks to Zulu for modeling:

Today, we painted the bathroom (Morgan is finishing up at the moment, pictures to follow).  Tomorrow, we're going to paint the office, then Friday we're going to lay vinyl in the office.  Feeling good about this week.

why (my) gardening is harder than (my) pregnancy

It came to me as I was attempting to till soil with an axe (we had found a power tiller in our shed, but declared it not functional after an hour of tinkering and more blood shed than I care to admit): Gardening is a lot like pregnancy. Now, I've only had one pregnancy and that pregnancy was an accident resulting in an amazing adoption story (side note: that story was published on Offbeat Mama: http://offbeatmama.com/2009/09/open-adoption-birth-story). However, as I was taking a break and looking over my garden, heart alight with all the possibilities it offers, I realized that this garden has already been a lot more difficult than my pregnancy, and here is why:

- My body didn't set the stage for my garden. I had to plan, clear the top soil, till, plant seeds, and fertilize. With my pregnancy, the only thing I consciously did was till.

- When pregnant, my body gave in-your-face clues as to what kind of nutrients it needed. With the garden, I've had to research endlessly and hope I wasn't getting bad advice, reading it wrong, or confusing the plants.

- I've bled a lot for this garden without the benefit of people giving me drugs and telling me what to do.

- I wasn't allergic to most of the things pregnancy involved. With the gardening, it turns out that I am allergic to just about everything that produces pollen in the spring.

- If you're healthy, pregnancy doesn't involve a bunch of bugs. And it definitely doesn't involve birds eating everything before you get a chance.

- If you forget a prenatal vitamin a couple days, it's not cause for concern. If you forget to water a couple days, you could lose all that hard work.

- No one is sympathetic to your gardening aches and pains.

- Pregnancy doesn't require getting out of bed early (except to pee, then you can go back), changing out of your pajamas, or getting dirty.

When all is said and done, though, I can only hope that at the end of the season, my garden has brought me a tenth of the joy that giving birth has. 

every new beginning

We've been talking about making a garden ever since we moved in... three years ago.  We only just now took the action to make it happen.  We had a bunch of stuff around the house (such as the herb trough and a power tiller), so we decided to use whatever we could find whenever possible to minimize costs.

We started with the herbs.  Had to fix the trough.  Had to sand and stain.  Then we got the dirt in and planted the herbs.  The problem?  We didn't really know when to plant and our basil is probably a write-off.  That's it on the left.

Next step, the actual garden.  We cleared away topsoil and put stakes in the ground and were ready for the power tiller.

After about an hour of tinkering and more money that I'd have liked to spend on gas, we gave up.  It seems the power tiller is also a write-off.

Fortunately, my brother isn't afraid of hard work and tilled the entire garden (about 18ftx8ft) using a pickaxe that we also found on our property.  While the men worked on tilling, I sanded and stained the picnic table that's been sitting in our front yard since we moved in:

Now we have a place to eat if the wind ever dies down.  And, you know, if are gardening skills can be honed enough to produce anything edible.

So far, here it is:

We've planted an artichoke and onions and are just praying at this point.