toilet #2 leak

Remember that leaking toilet I mentioned last week that was sure to be a pipe-sweating-nightmare?

Thursday night, in anticipation of the massive snow this weekend, we bought all the supplies to fix it up - a new valve, some pipine, new guts...We removed cleaned out the space (its next to the furnace/crawlspace) on Saturday, I got out all my soldering tools, and we set to work.

Turns out, after spending the week emptying a 5 gallon bucket daily, the nut thing under the tank needed to be tightened.

$50+ in supplies went back to Lowes today and I bought veggie seeds to start in the front window and YakTraks to walk the pup with in the snow.

Another Win!

Bathroom Facelift, Done!

For the past couple of weeks, we've been doing a facelift on our bathroom (part 1 - demo, part 2 - plumbing & tub tile, part 3 - fixtures & walls, part 4 - reinstalling).

This weekend, we did the finishing touches- new paint, hardware, and a shower curtain!

Here's the before:

And here's our afters!!

Re-tiled shower, new fixtures, and new curtain!

We added a line of subway tile amid the 4x4 squares for visual interest, kept original black border to add some vintage flair, and got a new vertically striped shower curtain to add height to the room. 

New flooring, beadboard to replace more awesome green tile, and new towel racks & toilet paper holders!

More beadboard...and the medicine cabinet is also original (the smallest options at the hardware store were too big!).

Our budget for the bathroom was $500. We didn't need to replace the toilet or sink, we have tile-tools from our kitchen facelift, and we borrowed my dad's wet saw, so we thought it was doable.

And it was!! We came close to blowing it since we needed a new TP rack and "stuff" rack for the shower, but I found them on sale for under $20 each at Target, as well as a new shower curtain for $20 less than this one that I love (but lucky for our budget, doesn't quite match the paint we picked recycled from our bedroom.)
Hardware/Accessories:$97.70
Plumbing: $127.94
Tile: $109.50
Flooring: $55.45
Walls: $103.93
Total: $494.52


WIN!

Cooking for the Month

Since September is here, time is of the essence. We both work full time, Princess Charming does a 90+ mile one way commute 2-3 days/week (and is away for work the other ones), we both coach club sports, and I am taking two doctoral classes and playing rugby. We, clearly, are insane time pressed.

So we've decided to expand our Cooking-For-The-Week into Cooking-For-The-Month. This month is kind of an experiment for us. In the future, we'll need to be a little more careful about recipe sizes. I think we have enough though, and it should help keep our food bill down since we'll have plenty of lunches and dinners - less excuses for unplanned eating out. Everything we made is relatively low in fat and includes something from our garden too!

Big trays:
2 meat lasagnas (How is lasagna low in fat? Drain meat well and go easy on the cheese...and sub in cottage for ricotta (sad, and my nana is turning in her grave, but healthier - so I don't feel too bad about the AMAZING fresh parm on top!)
1 veggie lasagna

Small trays:
2 chicken, bean and cheese enchiladas
1 cheesy pasta

Bags:
2 Greek Pasta (ground beef, green beans, onions, and tomatoes in pasta...with Feta!!)
2 Turkey Kielbasa and Peppers in Pasta
(and some extra sauce, oops)

Not pictured:
Greek pitas (a massive bowl of shredded chicken breast mixed with homemade tzatziki sauce with cucumbers and tomatoes to be (carefully) eaten from a pita pocket).

Total time: about 7 hours with prep and finishing up. I think we'll come out ahead, since our weekend cooking is usually 2-3 hours!

Ode to Carpet

(sing with me to Mary Had a Little Lamb.)
Old owner had a love of carpet, love of carpet, love of carpet.
Old owner had a love of carpet, love of carpet, love of carpet
and also of pads and glue.

We're a bit past midway through our budget facelift of our den. Originally we planned to drywall this room, build in a half bath (there is already a toilet...), and replace the funky acoustic tile ceiling.

(photo from our house shopping visit)

But like in the rest of the house, this renovation has been re-thought since we're looking to sell in the next year or so instead of next 5-7 like we'd originally planned (we've been here 18 months).

Thus far, we've replaced the lighting, painted, installed 3 new outlets, installed a door and rebuilt the rickety shelving. Today, we ripped up the carpeting. See that orangy carpeting above? Its not wall-to-wall, but what appears to be an edged remnant. Pulling it up revealed three colors of old paint (the old owner has shown us several times how he liked to paint AROUND things...) and a lot of decayed carpet pad. That stuck to the floor.

Moral of the story? Carpet isn't forever. And it is extremely gross upon removal.

While the pad in the main room came up pretty well with a broom, putty knife, and eventually mop, the stairs are another story. This stuff is glue. Princess Charming spent about 8 hours power washing the same unidentified carpet pad/glue/years of decay off the floor of our screened-in porch.

Coming soon...laminate flooring. A bit warmer than painted concrete, more practical for a partially subgrade & attached to the garage room than carpet, and a little more homey than the tile (matching our kitchen) we were considering), and more affordable than the cherry I really want!

Now to just find a free day...end of summer = work + rugby + school = the next free weekend day is October 5.

kitchen makeover, 98%

Remember that kitchen makeover we started over the winter?

To refresh your memory, here's the kitchen from when we moved in:
Last summer, we painted and changed the drawer and cabinet pulls...

But the yellow floor and "wood" countertop remained, plus the lovely laminate, grease stained backsplash, and a tipsy faucet.

Our goal was to give it a facelift for under a thousand dollars. Its been mostly done for a while, but the details were slow to be finished, since right after we finished the floor, counters and backsplash the chaos of the spring rugby seasons began.

What do you think?


What all was changed:

• Gone are the "wood" countertops with sharp, peeling edges. In are the new cut-to-fitIkea Countertops with a rounded edge.
• Gone are the semi-gothic handles! In are sleek chrome ones!
• Gone is the faucet that was falling into the sink. In is the faucet with a functional sprayer.
• Gone (well, tiled over) is the vintage yellow pebble lineoum. In is the "luxury" groutable vinyl tile (photos of this job here)
• Gone is the white-ish plastic backsplash. In is the tile. (This created a detail of time, as I then had to do outlet surgery to pull them flush, as the tile is much thicker than the plastic was!)
• Gone is the wallpaper. In is the new buttery yellow paint. We also painted the (unfortunate) ceiling tiles Craft White to help brighten the room (and cover the effects of age).
• Gone is the brown, not centered, room darking light. In is a normal light!

All in all, I believe we spent about $750 in supplies, well under budget. We also bought the little white cart to replace the table-for-not-really-two and an energy efficient and not hideous almond fridge (about $1100 total), but these items will come with us when we move, so I think of them seperately :)

Remaining details:

• Buy a paper towel holder. I have no idea how we don't have one!
• Hang blinds, purchased about 4 months ago :)
  

i might have a problem

Sunday, we bought two pounds of strawberries, two pounds of blueberries (I think anyway - it was a huge package) and a pint of raspberries. I made a huge fruit salad from it. I packed 3 cups of it with Princess Charming's food for the week (no, I am not a psycho ration-er, but she takes most of her meals with her to work 90 miles from home).

That left me with about half of a gigantic pyrex bowl full of fruit salad (lets guess 6 or 8 cups). Today is Tuesday.
I am out of fruit.

My problem is that fresh berries are kind of expensive, and I want to go buy more tomorrow.
I suppose this isn't a terrible problem to have in the scheme of things. It is a wonderful indulgence, and if I have a $30/week habit of fresh berries now till its out of season ($5 for a single half pint of raspberries in mid-winter doesn't work for me), I think that is ok.

Thanks, Student Financial Services

email I got at work today

In these difficult economic times, consider these payment options when planning to pay your upcoming Fall 2009 and Spring 2010 term bills:

3. Lock in current tuition rates through the Tuition Stabilizer Plan. If you have the resources, consider prepaying tuition and mandatory fees for future years at the 2009-2010 rate, and avoid increases. Enrollment can be for two, three, or four years, and is open to all students, except those entering their final year. Enroll by July 15.

Sure, let me pull (many) THOUSANDS of dollars out of my back pocket. Oh, wait, my "resources" you meant my trust fund didn't you?

sigh

and the rich get richer...

booked!

6 months after our wedding, we've finally booked our "honeymoon," a week long cruise in Alaska. Due to vacation time and $ constraints (aka, we want a new bathroom by year end), we're doing the round trip to Seattle. Denali will have to wait for another year!

I'm super excited. I haven't been on a trip over 4 days in years!!


Now, I need to find out...are cruise ship pools heated?

New Kitchen

OK, not really. But we're on our way to a new(er) looking kitchen. Since we won't be in this house more than another 2 yrs (not the 5-7 we'd planned on), we decided to forgo the bigger re-do and just give it an affordable face-lift. Inspired a bit by this reader redesign at TYH, we set out do make over our kitchen for under $1k.

Here's the before:

In the immediate months after we got the house, we stripped the lovely flowered wallpaper and painted, removed the pretty useful table for 2 people who don't use plates, got a light that wasn't too dated and room DARKENING, and removed those weird wooden corner thingies. We've also swapped out the ornate tarnished-brass colored handles for sleeker chrome ones.

(handle sidebar - These are NOT my favorite, but we have 3" holes, and I was not about the drill new ones and refill the old ones, narrowing our selection of affordable pulls at Lowes & Home Depot down to 2...this color and the same model in brass)

A couple of weekends ago, we embarked on the countertops and floor...in progress pictures below :) After we finish the backsplash this weekend (i hope), we'll have a "final" product".

Princess Charming working on unscrewing the sink so we could remove the larger piece of faux-wood-not-even-the-same-color-as-the-sorta-ugly-cabinets-edge seamed-laminate countertop. Bailey, lovely little guy, is helping. You can see the first piece of new countertop hanging out of the left of the stove (not installed yet).

The beginnings of the floor installation. The beauty of going with "luxury vinyl" tiles instead of real tile? Start to finish was under 6 hours, in part because it could go right over the yellow speckled linoleum. (We would have done tile, but our stove doesn't have enough clearance and isn't old enough to warrant replacing!)

So far so good on the budget for those who are interested. We spent $100 on countertops, $125 on flooring/materials, $140 on backsplash/materials, and $95 on the faucet & piping. I think the handles and paint came to about $200 (it was months ago). We're probably going to build a little island, and our total should hit about $900. But, for full disclosure, we're buying a fridge too (the almond 1980ish model is on its last legs, not to mention an eyesore), but we decided this is OK since we'll take it most likely with us when we move.