Upgrade

We've been keeping out workout stuff in an LLBean boat and toat bag for awhile, but I would like to be able to use the bag, so when I saw decorative "baskets" at Target last weekend for $15, I picked one up. 

Before

After!

Ideally we would have something that made the yoga mats less visible, but I've been looking since September with no luck. We might switch to keeping blankets in the bag and workout stuff in the storage ottoman. 

Wake Up

Yesterday our new alarm clock arrived. We've been using a lamp on a kitchen timer for a couple years, and finally sucked it up and bought a Philips Wake Up Light from Costco. 

The kitchen timer worked well but the alarm was hard to adjust. My alarm clock has been broken for awhile anyway, so I was excited for this one. The best part is the alarm time has a +/- feature! So if it's set for 6:15, you hit the minus button to set it for 6.  

The screen brightness was also a huge issue with my last alarm clock and this one has a high-medium-very low setting. So hopefully it won't keep me up. 

It looks a little too fancy for my nightstand though. I may have to do some clutter busting. 

Updates Lately

Posting has been light lately mostly due to technical difficulties, because Blogger in Internet Explorer is now refusing to allow me to upload photos from a URL so I can't show you some of the cool stuff we'd like to be doing, and we haven't actually been doing that much cool stuff on our own. 


The biggest things we did over the weekend were sort through my grandparent's house, and work on the mantle.  My grandmother died before Christmas, so we've been trying to get the house ready to rent or sell, and that includes cleaning out a garage and storage room full of my grandfather's tools.  As part of being married to a guy who likes to build stuff, I do not turn down free tools.  So when M. showed me the giant overflowing box of stuff that he was planning on taking home, I told him to just get a second box and that we would find space for whatever he thought we needed.  As I carried in TWO giant outdoor extension cords on rollers, I regretted that only very slightly, because for the most part, he picked items that we will actually need/use and that are in good shape. 

I, on the other hand, have acquired a great deal of my great-grandmother's china and have to figure out where to put it.  I think we know who is the less practical family member.  There are a few pieces that we came home with that I'm really excited about, like this vase which was hand painted by my great-grandfather. He used to take a lot of ceramics classes when he was recovering from a bad stroke, so he painted a lot of ceramic Christmas trees and pumpkins, but I didn't know he had done any vases, and this one is in my colors, so I was really excited that my aunt had unearthed it. 

We also acquired a lot of books.  Because we are crazy people who believe there is no such thing as too many books.  Actually, crazy people are the ones who believe there is such a thing. 


After we unloaded the car on Sunday, M. moved the car out of the parking pad and got to work sanding the mantel.  He's got it almost down to the wood, and while we'd like to stain it, it just has so many parts that need to be patched that we are worried it won't take the staining well, and there are some parts that the paint is not coming off of.  The jury is still out on color, but I think a natural color that is a few shades darker than the walls will work nicely.  Everything else in the room is a dark brown, so that is probably what we will end up with, but I'm wondering if there is any way to do accents or a two-tone look.  (Tuxedo look?) We'll keep you posted!

Garden

Last Friday, I mailed off our renewal of our community garden plot - except this year, we are switching from the City Farm at Light and Heath St. to the City Farm at Charles and Heath, which is all of two blocks closer to our house. However, it's half the distance, so it feels justifiable, and we are upgrading to a plot that hopefully will get a lot more sun, so that will be nice and maybe prove fruitful. 

What are we going to plant this year?  Well, last year we had very good luck with Roma tomatoes and I had a lot of fun making my own pasta sauce and pizza sauce, so we are definitely doing Romas. We also had excellent luck with small Japanese eggplants, which were fruitful and delicious, so I think we will do those. We don't do squash because of the squash borers. I think this year I will grow cucumbers, even though my husband doesn't particularly care for them.  We had excellent luck with our beets last year, so we will be doing those again, and I think this year we are going to plant a lot more greens, specifically kale. 

Spring has Sprung!

March is always weird here in Maryland, and the weather oscillates between springly sixties and oh-my-god-this-winter-will-never-end-it's-so-cold.  But! Daylight savings time means we can get some projects done in the evenings, and soon our weekends are freeing up as well. So it's time for some Spring To-Do listing!


Checking out our house to dos, there are a number of outdoor projects that have been put on hold that we plan to tackle this spring.  Spring is also when we were planning on redoing our upstairs bathroom and possibly build a deck, so we need to start calling contractors. 


Outside:

• Paint side and rear door - I no longer have any desire to paint the front door, but we do need to paint the side door and the rear door is pretty ugly.
• Install doorbell
• Weed front sidewalk/steps
• Add something decorative to the left of the steps
• Add window boxes
• Clear excess plant pots, etc. from parking pad
• Powerwash cement in side alley
• Remove concrete post and wall (phase 2)

Master Bathroom

• Renovate to add double sinks, narrow door, large medicine cabinet, heated tile, insulate wall behind sink to avoid frozen pipes, resurface tub. 
• Build cubby into wall behind shower for additional storage
• Replace radiator with exhaust fan
• Hang curtains
• Spray paint washcloth basket - I made a very sad attempt at this once using acrylic paint and it did not come out well, so we've been waiting for it to be nice enough outside to spray paint

We are also going to be doing some large scale spring cleaning.  When putting away my winter outfits, I'm going to have to admit to myself that I have a very large number of sweaters and I wear like, four of them, and I'm also going to have to downsize my hoodie collection from four to perhaps two.  I'm considering consignment as an option for my nicer pieces that I haven't worn, rather than donating them, but that means storing them through the summer to consign at the beginning of the fall. 


I am also continually downsizing my considerable fabric collection, but recently learned of an opportunity to donate homemade baby quilts to children who are taken from unsafe homes by CPS here in Baltimore City, so I'm hoping maybe my mom and my sister, who have been sewing together recently, might be interested in a little quilting party to help me stash bust and do some good. 

New mantel!

Our fireplace, sad and mantle-less.

A mantel has been on our to-do list since we moved in.  I looked at a few tutorials, but the first time my friend Kelly came over, she commented, "we have an extra mantel."  Four months later, we finally got measurements to them and she and her husband confirmed the size of their mantel.  So we took our corolla the five blocks to their place and tried to get this bad boy in the car.   

It took several tries.

 It may have gotten a bit ridiculous. 

 But! We got it home and here it is, in front of the fireplace, fitting perfectly.  I was absolutely thrilled when we first saw it, since I was expecting a plain, generic mantel, but it's beautiful and fancy.  I especially like how the center part comes to a point.  We are going to paint it and do some repair work.  We're not sure how many layers of paint are on it, but hopefully it's just one layer and can be sanded down pretty eaisly.  Ideally we would sand it and stain it to be wood-colored, but I think that it might be best to go ahead and paint it, but we aren't sure what color.  We could go with the same espresso brown as most of our other furniture (does Ikea sell black-brown paint?) or possibly the same latte color as the walls in the living room. 

Anyone have any color suggestions?

Fireplaces

As we buckle down to work from home today, I'm at my desk between the front window and the fireplace.  As much as I don't want the annoyance of having a fireplace and was happy ours wasn't functional, sometimes it would be nice to sit by a crackling fire. 

We started talking about gas fireplace inserts.  Given our fireplace has the gas vent from the hot water heater and the HVAC, we could tap into them to vent a gas insert, so the only question is finding one that is an appropriate size and deciding it is worth the $1200. 

This one actually has pretty good dimensions, doesn't need to vent, and can be installed as a zero-clearance fireplace.  I don't know what that means.  It needs 15" behind it though, and we don't have that, so I guess we would be looking at somehow building out our fireplace for it. 

I'm a bit more inclined to go with something that would actually just go in front of the fireplace if we have to build out anyway.  This guy is much cheaper and the right height, plus we wouldn't have to build a mantle.  At 13" deep, it would only creep out about a foot, so not significantly more than our existing fireplace cover, which we could get rid of.  I can't decide if it would look cheesy though, since we did see a few houses with something similar and it did look odd. 

There are also electric options.  They are cheaper, safer, and easier to install.  However, they are not real fireplaces, they are well decorated space heaters.  I kind of like the idea of something big like this:

which would look fairly substantial in front of the chimney (our old place had a massive, impressive mantle that we did really like.)  But ultimately, I don't think it would suit us.    

Have you ever seen a standalone fireplace design you liked? Where can we get an 8" deep insert for our fireplace?