My Latest: Furniture Refinishing and Pee Gardening

a round-up of upcycled playing card crafts

a round-up of the most important furniture refinishing skills

yes, another discussion of wastewater gardening

and my new fabric storage bin, made from an antique shipping container

Although it was quite interesting having a real estate empire, on Friday Matt and I closed on our old house. I'm alternately thrilled at having the extra set of hands to move and unpack here, since prior to this most of Matt's attention was spent prepping our old house for the sale, and horrified that with that set of hands comes a mind with its own opinions about where things should go and how they should look--the nerve!!!

At the moment, Matt and I are locked in a battle of wills regarding the dresser that I painted chalkboard grey. It's solid wood and awesome, and I set it at the foot of our bed with our TV on top and our DVDs and my exercise equipment in its drawers. The TV doesn't have a lazy susan, however, and I need to be able to turn it so that I can exercise on the floor opposite while watching it, so Matt found, also on the side of the road, a cheapo, particle board and laminate TV stand that's ugly as hell and that I didn't spend a billion hours painting, BUT that does already have casters on for easy rotation. He wants to put that cheap-ass TV stand there in our bedroom, at the foot of our bed, instead of my gorgeous dresser.

Crazy, right? I know!

Ooh, I know! Matt's at the gym right now--before he gets back, I think I'll go lift the dresser up and set it ON TOP OF the TV stand. He'll just love it, I'm sure.

Graffiti on our Lockers

I've had these old lockers from the IU Wrestling Team's locker room for a LONG time, and that whole time they've always been the same chipped black and red paint with IU Wrestling stickers on, because they were so freakin' heavy that there was just absolutely no way that I was going to be able to move them across the house, down the stairs, into the yard, and back again.

Our new house, however, has a wheelchair ramp! Matt is god-like in his strength, and the man can move anything if he's got a ramp. He moved those lockers out of our old house (and I don't know how the hell he managed that, but he did), onto a trailer borrowed from a friend, off that trailer at our new house, and set them in the driveway for me, with the agreement that he'd move them inside and put them where I wanted them whenever I wanted him to.

Because I'm a pretty tacky person at heart, I didn't want to refinish the lockers to look cute or anything like that, mind you. Instead, I wanted to camp them up with graffiti!

I primed only the front of the lockers, because priming them was an insanely, stupidly difficult job (that steel mesh made brush-on primer a Sisyphean ordeal of constantly mopping up drips, and it also absolutely soaked up spray-on primer to very little effect, since 98% of it simply went through the mesh):

No matter where we live, you'll always be able to tell which driveway is ours!

On Independence Day, after the parade and the park, we went to the hardware store and bought spray paint in every rainbow color, plus black. I couldn't find a silver that I liked, and we already had gold at home, because Syd had wanted to make a PVC pipe "light saber" for a friend's birthday the previous week.

Off and on for the rest of the long weekend, whenever the kids had a mind to, they took spray paint to lockers, and oh, my goodness, they had a fabulous time with it:

I really just needed them to get down a random base layer that looked like decades of old graffiti that had been painted over tons of times, and they did a masterful job.

We also spent a lot of time talking about graffiti as an art form, which explains Will's little lecture on graffiti art in this video:

That kid is going to be a superb politician/professor one day: she can parrot back parts of her reading or one of my lectures or something heard on NPR, mix in stuff she knows on her own, and add in whatever VERY firm stance that she has immediately taken on the issue, presented as fact, and will defend unto death. Currently, you should hear her talk about the drug industry--a Michael Jackson song came on the radio yesterday, which got us talking about him, which got us talking about drug overdoses, which got us talking about drug abuse, which got us talking about pain management, which got Will ranting about how someone needs to finally map the human brain, dang it, so that people can alter their brains to do what they want without drugs (I don't know how that became the takeaway, but there you go--add mad scientist to her future career possibilities).

When the kids had happily covered every square inch of the lockers with color, I added some text. I had wanted Matt to do something really stylized, but he was spending the day at our old house and I was impatient, so I just did it myself with my junior high bubble letters:

It's part of Matt's last name, plus if you're going to do graffiti you have to have a Doctor Who reference, plus the year that we moved into our new house. 

With all of these house projects that must be done before we can stop living in chaos, preparations for our impending road trip have taken a serious hit. If you know me, you will be shocked to hear that the children and I have not intensively studied for this trip yet! We plan to listen to the Little House books during our trip, not before, and the entire Little House and paleontology unit studies are now going to have to be completed AFTER our trip, not before as they clearly should be. 

I must take deep, calming breaths as I think of that, and remind myself that a vacation can still be fun even if you haven't spent two months studying for it...

My Latest: Poop and Libraries (and the Antique Furniture Hiding in My Outbuildings)

for Insteading, a discussion of humanure composting and wastewater gardening

and for Crafting a Green World, an article about a little kid forced to shut down his Little Free Library

Here on the home front, there's not as much unpacking going on as you'd think--can't really put things away when there's nothing to put stuff ON, or IN, you know--but I've got a dresser half-painted in the garage and my lockers half-painted on the driveway, and the card catalogue also out there waiting its turn, and tomorrow evening, perhaps, before we walk across our yard to go watch the new Transformers movie at the drive-in (I'm torn about letting the kids watch this one--on the one hand, I think it'll will be too scary and too long for them, but on the other hand, I didn't let them watch X-Men with us last weekend, and you can't let kids live next door to a drive-in and not let them go to ANY of the movies!!!), I'm going to take Matt on a tour of the old garage and the even older general store, and point out to him all of the antique, unfinished wooden storage units that I want him to move inside for me. 

Namely these--

behind the egregious photo of my stove--toy shelves for the living room and children's bedroom?

MASSIVE dresser with tons of these little drawers that just sit on the shelves--wants to live in my bedroom and hold my pretty things?

feed bin? Super gross right now, but could hold a hell of a lot of fabric all nicely folded and out of sight

display shelves from the general store--maybe these would be better toy/treasure shelves, given the kids' insistence on displaying ALL THE THINGS

And I haven't even been into the attic yet! It requires bringing a ladder in from the garage, which I'm not up for, but the kids and Matt did it once. The kids tell me that there's a fire truck up there, and Matt says that there are Christmas decorations from who knows when. 

I'll check it out when I've got the downstairs sorted...

House Report: Being at Home

Chaos!

Good chaos, at least. Happy chaos.

We've been about a week living in our new house--well, on Sunday night we slept on bare mattresses back at our old house after the toilets in our new house backed up into the bathtubs (turns out that houses that are vacant for two years get things like roots growing into their main sewer lines), but plumbers fixed that for us on Monday and we've been here ever since.

Most of our belongings are still in boxes lining the walls, because our new house doesn't have any SHELVES!!!!!, and poor Matt is still spending most of his time at the old house getting it ready to be sold, but the kids and I, at least, are happily puttering about and finding new corners to read in and watching the chickens learning how to free-range and exploring our new property, which is wonderful and beautiful and poorly-maintained and bounteous. Already, as we drove the other day through town to redeem Will's reading program prize of an ice cream voucher from a local ice cream stand, I looked at the houses that we passed in town and thought, "GAH! Their yards are all so SMALL!"

I have a to-do list so long that I've actually imported it into Microsoft Word so that I can organize it according to priority (lots of painting ratty found-on-the-side-of-the-road furniture to make it look less ratty, lots of shelf building, lots of transplanting perennials from old house to new, etc.), and Matt has a totally different to-do list that's even longer, but we are SO happy. And loving our house. And walking across our yard to the drive-in to watch movies. And last night, coming home after 10:00 pm from a swimming date with friends, we stopped at the yard in astonishment, then sat together on the roof of our root cellar and watched hundreds of fireflies sparkling like twinkle lights in the woods behind the field behind our house--all over the woods, from the tops of the trees to the bottoms, incomparable to anything we'd ever seen before.

To conclude, two photos, the only two, other than cell phone shots of chickens cutely wandering where they shouldn't, that I've found time to take this week:

Yes, I've been permitting the kids to ride their scooter indoors.

And yes, Will's found a spot to read. That's all she needs in a home.

Really, though. We definitely need some shelves.

Organizing our Home Library by Author and Dewey Decimal Number, or, I Have Finally and Inevitably Lost the Plot

In our current house we have [had] books in just about every room of the house. Large-format non-fiction reference lived in the basement playroom. Adult fiction and some non-fiction lived in the living room, as did certain ready-reference books and popular magazines. Children's books mostly lived in their bedroom. Homeschooling and crafts books lived in the studio. My esoteric fiction and non-fiction (Welsh-English dictionary, anyone?) lived in my bedroom.

This was inconvenient on many levels. I periodically had to sort through the adult fiction shelves to find books that Will would be interested in, as her reading ability and maturity grew. If we were researching a particular topic--frogs, say--we might have to scan books in the living room, in the children's bedroom, the studio, and in the basement playroom, and we still might miss a couple of relevant resources. If I was looking for a book that I wanted to re-read, I didn't know if I would find it in the living room or in the children's room or in my bedroom.

One of my many organizational goals for our new house is to shelve the entire family's books in one central location, probably the big family room with the very high ceilings. I'd like to make a bookshelf similar to this pipe bookshelf shelving unit, also using some marble slabs that Matt bought from our IU Surplus Store back when we were planning to actually put countertops in our kitchen (we never did; they're still plywood). Will agreed to the plan, as long as none of the bookshelves are out of her reach (I may offer a compromise with a stepladder, but we'll see). The plan will only really work, however, if the books are more or less organized; having to scan every book on four dozen shelves is barely less work than having to scan every book in four different rooms.

So while I'm relatively fresh in the face of packing, my first order of business was to organize every book in our house by fiction and non-fiction, to further organize the fiction using alpha by author, to further organize the non-fiction using broad Dewey Decimal categories, and to pack them up in boxes with labels on so that they stay organized.

In case you DON'T think that sounds crazy, check out what doing it actually looks like:

Um... yeah, those are a billion mile-high stacks of books, each with an index card on top labeling it with its author letter or Dewey Decimal category. I spent an entire Saturday doing it, and as if that's not crazy enough, whenever Matt and the kids weren't in the room to witness this further deterioration of my sanity, I arranged each stack with its spines nicely facing out and then photographed it:

This is the S stack. We've got Bram Stoker, William Shakespeare, Lemony Snicket, Edmund Spenser, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Seuss, Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Scary, and more. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is in there, as well as Black Beauty and Heidi, and The Sagas of Icelanders, indexed by title since it doesn't have an author.

The P stack is a little light, but we've still got Philip Pullman and Thomas Pynchon. Another way in which this system will be useful is that if I like an author or a series, I like to collect all the available titles, but since I mainly shop used, it's a gradual process. If all the books in the house are catalogued together, it will be easier for me to see, for instance, that I only have the first book in the His Dark Materials series--for shame!

Other than Island of the Blue Dolphins and Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the O stack is dominated by Mary Pope Osborne. I'd stopped consciously collecting the Magic Tree House books after Will grew out of them a bit (she still reads the new ones, but doesn't often re-read the old ones), but I'm back at it again now that Syd is a reader.

There's more variety in the M stack. We've got Daisy Meadows, George R.R. Martin, about three copies of The Secret Garden, Stephanie Meyer, Robert McCloskey, Robin McKinley, Herman Melville, Margaret Mitchell, all the Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books, W. Somerset Maugham, Peyton Place, and L.M. Montgomery.

In the L stack, there's Ira Levin (The Stepford Wives is soooo creepy!), Anne Lamott, C.S. Lewis, Jack London, Lois Lowry, Gail Carson Levine, and Astrid Lindgren. 

After that, I stopped taking photos because Matt came in, and we've already had many discussions about who is acting crazier because of the move (I say him; he incorrectly says me), so I didn't want to give him any more ammunition.

Matt helped me pack up all the books into boxes--one great thing about volunteering weekly at a food pantry is that I'm able to collect so many boxes!--and label them with Sharpies, and he shoved them into the children's room so that I won't have to look at them.

Five minutes after we'd finished, I found a whole entire shelf of books that I'd forgotten to pack, and then Matt found another stack of books up high on a back shelf out of sight, and then I remembered that I'd packed the book we need for this week's Magic Tree House Club meeting. I threw the leftover books in the giant box in which I was packing blankets, so I'll deal with them later, and while the kids are at tennis class, I'll see if there's a library digital copy of Thanksgiving on Thursday to put on Will's Nook.

If only packing clothes and dishes and linens and craft supplies were as interesting as packing books!

Meet our New House

It finally happened.

I feel like I've probably been going on for years about our off-and-on, more-casual-than-not house search. We've always loved our current location, even if we don't love our current house, so for any house to ever match the convenience and joy of living across the street from the park and a mile from downtown, it would have to be just about perfect. It would have to have some acreage, partly grass and partly wooded. It should have extra space for ranging beyond our property lines. It must have privacy. It would have to have, if not necessarily more square footage, more open areas for living. It should have personality, although hopefully not a wonky and spiteful one.

It would basically have to be the house that we just agreed to buy.

I was too excited, and the kids were too wild, for me to take great pictures of our recent visit to the house that we're buying, but, for what it's worth, here are some of my favorite parts of it:

The property has woods, albeit a sort of brambly, overgrown woods that no one has tromped in for decades:

The kids and I explored some of these woods on one morning of our visit, however, and even picking our way around thorns and through brush, we already found so many treasures--a sinkhole, a creek, a jack in the pulpit, a tree growing out of the bottom of an overturned, rusted-through metal washtub.

I've assigned the kids to trail-blazing after we move in, and they've made their own plans for a secret fort where they can spend the night, and a secondary clubhouse, and also a tree house--basically their own little primeval village.

The property has fields, and a substantial amount of them, enough for a giant garden next year:

The current owner says that this field used to be fenced, and horses and cows lived there, so the ground should be very fertile. My dream for it this summer is to fence in an area for a garden next year, then set the chickens free to roam inside and do all my tilling and fertilizing for me.

The property has several odd little buildings on it, including a garage, an actual smokehouse (perhaps next year's chicken coop?), an actual root cellar--

I have no idea what we'll do with this. Do you?

--and a just-about-to-fall-down 1930s general store:

Yes, I'm serious. If it stays standing this year, we can hopefully budget to get it renovated next year--or at least get the floor stabilized enough to be able to walk inside without probably having the whole building collapse on you.

We have a goodly amount of space between us and our next-door neighbors on one side, but on the other side, we do have a neighbor pretty close:

Yes, I'm serious about this one, too. The current owners of the house had owned this drive-in since 1955. They recently sold it to another family, who plans to open it again this month. Matt and I have taken the kids to this drive-in ever since they were born--when they were babies and toddlers, they'd actually fall asleep on the drive TO the drive-in, and then Matt and I would feel like we were dating all over again, sitting on lawn chairs watching a movie with our kids sound asleep in the car behind us. 

My main goal the second that we've moved in is to somehow convince the owners of the drive-in that it would be an excellent idea to let us drag our lawn chairs over to watch movies for free anytime we want. Doesn't that seem like something that you would want to let us do if you owned a drive-in?

Okay, if you're still lingering, rubbernecking our insanity, then now you get to see the actual house!

This is the foyer: 

It goes across the entire back of the house, both the 1980s addition that doubles the square footage, and the original 1940s portion. It opens up to the main door from the driveway AND the back deck, and has two doors leading from it to other parts of the house. I had been hoping to set up an aerial silks rig for the kids (it's the biggest item on their wish list) across one of those beams, but it turns out they're just decorative. Maybe that beam up top will bear weight, or maybe we're just destined to have an aerial silks rig in the living room. The washer and dryer are on the main level in this house--yay!--so the kids can start doing their own laundry, ideally. We also have room for a bench by the front door, and the plan is to set up a system to neatly store shoes and other outerwear here.

From this foyer, there are honest-to-gawd windows that look into the 1940s part of the house:

I guarantee that my kids will never use a door to get from one room to the other.

The kitchen has its own table!

Think of it--a table, just for eating, right in the kitchen! AND there's room for another table in the living room:

The video game stuff that Matt and the kids like could go in here, and I don't know what else. It would be nice to have a place to watch family movies, and certainly some of the children's toys will need to be stored in here. I'm not in love with the carpet, so perhaps this is the place to put the table for messy art activities, with a cheap rug underneath. This is also likely where we'll install the aerial silks rig, if it doesn't work in the foyer. When the girls are older, though, we might give this room more over just to them, so they can have a more private place to socialize with their friends.

The kids' new bedroom is a little smaller than their current one, but it has a big closet, and won't need so many shelves as they have now, because our dream is to shelve the entire family's books together in the big family room. It does have sunny windows--

--one of which leads to a concrete patio where they can play and we can have a container garden.

The kids will also have their own bathroom, thank goodness:

On the other side of the bathroom is another room just that size that I would like to use as my study/studio space. See the skylight?

I'll also need to upgrade that lighting fixture at some point, because that other window looks out onto the foyer, not the outside. I'd love to not store our homeschooling materials in this room, because that's what takes up the majority of my current study/studio, but I'm not sure where else they'd go. This house does have two humongous walk-in closets, so perhaps one closet *could* be dedicated to homeschool materials, with materials currently in use stored elsewhere?

Perhaps here, in the big family room?

We'd like to put a permanent space for the children's computer and our printer here, perhaps underneath a loft bed that we already own, with a reading space on top and large bookshelves on each side. My dream is to shelve the entire family's books together, organized and alphabetized like a library. The space is also big enough that I'd like to score a huge conference table from our university's surplus equipment store, large enough that we could have a couple of projects going at once AND have space for schoolwork. Our big dorm couch can go here, and our record cabinet. I'd also like to attractively store our large collection of games and puzzles here , and the children's creative, large-format toys that love to have space and that the adults love to jump in and play with, too--building blocks, racecar tracks, etc. The room also looks out onto a large back deck:

It will be a friendly space to live our days on in nice weather.

Matt and I plan to upgrade to a king-sized bed in our humongous master bedroom:

We'll actually have room for nightstands to hold our books, and my treadmill could go here and not be squashed for space.

This room has its own big bathroom, with a giant walk-in handicapped shower (that wants to be renovated into a large jetted tub, perhaps?) and TWO giant, walk-in closets.

So that's our house! Our hope is to be settled in by the end of May, so we can start stressing about who on earth will want to buy our current house.

Ideally, someone who really wants a hallway with handmade comic book wallpaper, and a basement that has a giant timeline on it, and kid-painted rainbows on many surfaces...

The Recent Lack of Posts is Due to...

...this:

It had to be done. The bathroom sink was duct taped to the wall, duct tape also covered the many broken and missing tiles behind the bathtub, the floor was just sad, and as I write, our contractor is cutting out and replacing most of those boards in the lower half of the bathroom, since they're apparently waterlogged and rotted, sigh.

See that spot in the middle, though? We're going to put a window back in that spot where a window clearly originally was. I'm pretty excited, because I like a bathroom with a window, and I like anything that gets a little more natural light into our dungeon-esque home. 

In the meantime, the girls and I have been doing library school, park school, Barnes & Noble school, and school basically anywhere that we can't hear hammering and thudding and rotten boards being ripped away from their foundation. It's actually working out well, though--we're focusing on pencil-and-paper work, which is easily transported, and so the girls have been really concentrating on learning cursive, using printed lessons from my StartWrite program, and catching up to grade level on the odd neglected math subject, using print-outs from my pdf copies of Math Mammoth. I'm using the chapter reviews as pre-tests, which allows me to assign just the necessary chapters, and so we've been having an interesting time with geometric solids, areas of rectangles, types of triangles, and polygons. 

I've got some fun hands-on enrichment activities for these subjects, though, which normally I would be interspersing with the pencil-and-paper work, but that will have to wait until we're doing school back at home, back at our big table, back with endless shelves of school supplies and art materials and reference works.

I mean, this bathroom will be done sometime soon.

Right?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Winners and Chair Covers

the winner of the Soaps to Live by giveaway

and a tutorial for DIY chair covers

otherwise known as the cat's new favorite place to sleep

Ideally, I'll make two sets of these--one to wash and one to wear. This project, of course, joins the to-do list of imaginary things that will never be completed, such as just one more set of cloth napkins, a guest set of cloth napkins, a guest set of felted wool Mason jar cozies, the second set of mattress pads...

My Latest over at CAGW: Beeswax Sourcing and Roller Shade Redos

a review of Knorr Beeswax's rolled beeswax sheets

and a tutorial for mending a torn roller shade with vintage and stash fabrics

I am THRILLED about how nicely my roller shade repair turned out, which makes me all the more irritated about how long I left the torn roller shade looking that ugly. 

Let's see...the weather had just turned warm for Spring, so I'd gotten into the habit of leaving the window entirely open, and Willow got this great idea about how she was going to climb out the window, using the roller shade, Rapunzel-style, to belay from...