WV Hills

Oh look darling....where are we?
















What is better than a lovely drive in the country? Shady lanes, wide rolling fields, and even a turkey-spotting.


















Oh gag, what is that smell??





Darn it, we're still at the landfill!

I swear HTS has to have the prettiest landfill ever. You can almost imagine you're far away, out in the country, if it wasn't for the fact that under all this beauty is several hundred feet of garbage, and what I am convinced is several billion cubic meters of methane, waiting to blow Guyandotte sky-high.

But there are landfill surprises...what is this? Do you see what I see? Someone had ditched an entire flower bed full of irises!

MINE! Free plants! Hooray!
I can't wait until next spring to see what color my garbage flowers are!

Something's Missing!

Where did it go?



















The forest fairies came and took it.


















Oh no, wait, that was us. Five days, three parents, and seven trips to the dump, hauling stupid sticks and limbs in 80 degree weather.

Death to trees.

...and I helped!

I've painted the living room and dining rooms recently, and I'm working on the trim this week. It's going to be a yellow-creamy white, very much like the white that was already here. But it will be clean.

Trimwork is so BORING! It's times like this I'm glad I don't have crown moulding.

No, not really. I wish I had crown moulding.

Before: WHITE!

















After: BLUE! GREEN! GREENISH-BLUE!

















And, what fun is a little painting without an assistant?















Don't look at me like you don't know what I'm talking about. You know exactly where you've been.

Staycation

J and I have taken this week off to work on some of the thousands of projects around the house...things that are just too big, too scary, or too overwhelming to attempt to finish in a series of evenings.

So far, we've accomplished sleeping until at least ten and starting the dinner/cocktail hour at about 5pm. Between that, some other things are actually getting done.

For one, we've finished the kitchen floor. When we moved in, it was covered in a delightful faux-parquet vinyl floor. Mmm. Fake wood.
















It is now covered in a delightful matte fake stone.



















This floor was truly trying labor. DO NOT, no matter how nice They say it's going to look, attempt to lay down this stuff on a diagonal. We'd have been finished in two hours (and not ten months) if we'd not done that.

I keep you posted as the week progresses, and we'll see what happens when two lazy people try to buckle down.

Internet Porn

...and by "porn", I mean house porn. You know, paying for it. Shopping.

I spend a horrendous amount of time on the internet. Time that probably should be spent stripping paint from hardware or finishing the kitchen floor is taken up with cyber-stalking coveted items on shopping sites and obsessing about the color degradation of my ancient monitor misrepresenting a certain lampshade color. In my mind, I have furnished this entire house 6 times. In reality, we are still sleeping on mattresses on the floor.

Below are a few of my favorite shopping/dreaming sites, whether I actually buy anything from them or not. Actually, I probably spend the most money at the Home Decorators outlet, as I have gotten some really high-quality, wool rugs there for not much money (compared to the POS I bought a Lowe's that was expensive and turned out to be crappy).

Of course, there's the Pottery Barn catalog, along with Ballard Designs, Home Decorators (as well as their outlet) and Restoration Hardware. I have also had a lot of luck with Lamps Plus and Overstock.com (I have spent actual money on these sites). Off the beaten path, we can find Grandin Road, and, for you castle dwellers, Design Toscano. For modernists, we have Room and Board and Design Within Reach (HAH!). And, if you are ridiculously endowed with cash, we have Source Perrier and WS Home.

Home Decorators and their outlet always have a coupon running for $10 off a $5o purchase. You can easily find the code online through a Google search, or just sign up for a catalog, which will come with a coupon. There's one in the mail all the time.

Of course, don't shop ANYWHERE online until you have signed up at Ebates. When you register (free) and then enter sites through their portal, you can get like 3% and up cash back on your purchases. Each purchase is registered to their site, and every three months or so they send you a check. I make out like a bandit at Xmas, and then ususally get back around $15 per check, depending on how much I shopped. Since I usually order house checks, cat meds, lighting, hotel rooms and food online, I always see who is going to hook me up with the biggest discount and use them (well, not always, but usually). It's totally worth it, and you have nothing to lose if you never use it.

If you want to check it out, use this link:

http://www.ebates.com/rf.do?referrerid=FDKIXw6AN9M5r%2FLHCatT1A%3D%3D

(FULL DISCLOSURE: IF YOU USE THIS LINK, SIGN UP AND THEN BUY SOMETHING, I WILL MAKE $5.00. MAYBE $10 THIS MONTH. MY EMAIL ADDY IS SARADEEL@GMAIL.COM. DO IT. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO. YOU ARE GETTING VERY SLEEPY.)

The most I've ever gotten back was about $23 for around $250.00 spent at four different stores; your results may vary. But really...it can really help you rationalize some purchases. Sometimes that cash back covers the shipping. Sometimes, it will bring the price in below another web site. There's all sorts of reasons to use it. Mainly because I GET $5.00 when you sign up.

Really, it's SHOPPING! I wouldn't steer you wrong.

What are you looking at??

I am totally addicted to pretty, shiny publications that have photos of homes I can only hope to someday own. Most of the mags I am lucky to get strip covered from work, so I'm not paying for nearly as many as I was. But it's still pretty bad.

This is what I'm reading:

House Beautiful (or, House Pitiful, as it's known around here) I totally love this, as their decorating makes sense to me.
Veranda Something which to aspire. When I am re-born into some family who owns Trump Tower.
Traditional Home--did you ever think an ex-heavy metal rocker would embrace anything "traditional"? Quite possibly the bible of my decorating taste.
Vanity Fair--in English and Italian (but in Italian just for the pictures).
Southern Living--good planting advice, but too much frou-frou otherwise.
Southern Lady--completely out of control, unless you are an ex-deb or pageant mother. Obscene fun.
Fresh Home--A new publication that has a lot of fixy-crafty-makey-things that I will never, ever do. But J. seems to enjoy the technicality of it all and it was in bathroom rotation for a couple of weeks. Plus, it has lots of pretty pictures of attractive, thin people living in homes you might actually be able to live in. I try to imagine myself as one of these folks by age 50.
Room and Board catalog--really modern stuff, but some good ideas.

And of course, stupid Pottery Barn. Even though their world is SO not real, it's so carefully and calculatedly constructed it's irresistible. I almost WANT to pay $15 for wooden soda crates I could steal down in the West End from the defunct Coca-Cola bottling plant.

On special occasions, I like to pick up Architectural Digest, or anything else that costs more than about $4.99 an issue. I also really like foreign home mags, but lately our bookstore has quit carrying the good ones, and I am not paying $12.00 in this recessionary climate for subpar, pan-oceanic fantasies. Oh, there is still English Country Home, which is like the "Playboy" of home porn for me...totally lusty but very tastefully done. Especially when they have articles like, "How to Make your 18th Century Home Liveable" followed by 6 pages of restored wallpaper and boot scrapers and such. I can't even tame a cottage from the 1930's. My hat is off to the intrepid Britons.

And, R.I.P. to Cottage Living, which folded this year. I guess my patronage wasn't enough to keep them in business. I miss it already.

All this looking is very helpful for shopping and dreaming. I rip out my favorite pages, articles and pictures and keep them all in a huge expandable folder, organised by room or function. Then when I see something in a store or online, I can think--does this really fit the look and feel I'm going for? I've found it really helpful in deciding what it is I really like...since I can look at a room with a stainless steel sofa and think "awesome" and then see a chair with cabbage rose fabric and weep from the beauty of it all. Tearing out pictures has really helped my define to myself what kinds of objects I want to live among. When I start looking through the folder, I see themes emerging. It's all quite scientific.

Then I just go buy something nutty out of pure love anyway.

Dee-light-ful

If you have been to our home, you are well aware of the treacherous path you must take up the tipsy steps along the driveway, to the cratered slate walk, then up the narrow steps to the porch. If you are the homeowner, now add "try to fit key into door with no light source other than that annoying streetlight I wish would disappear".

We had a porch light, but it only worked intermittently--we would replace a bulb and it would burn out in 2 or 3 days. We'd put in a new bulb (we tried several kinds) but it would mysteriously quit working again. This was getting frustrating, as we had to get the ladder out to change bulbs, and pretty soon we just gave up and started cursing the darkness. I also thought that, while charming, the existing fixture was too small for Miss 43's stately face. It just kind of...disappeared into the front of the house.





I have been on a mission to replace the light. I'd been all over the online places and finally decided in the spirit of just getting it done NOW, something from Lowe's would suffice. J. and I picked out something very large and vaguely English cottage-looking.




In an act of installation and balance that involved two ladders, some angry wasps and a number of screwdrivers, we removed the fixture. Almost immediately I regretted doing so, as from the weight and quality of the fixture I realized this was probably Miss 43's original light.






It's extremely heavy, looks like aged copper, and had that cloth-wrapped wiring that screams "OLD"! But, I had to keep reminding myself, it doesn't work, you sentimental donut!



J. climbed to install the bracket for the light. And of course, it didn't fit. The screws were too short to reach past the stonework. We don't have the right screws, and it's 6pm on Sunday, when everything closes. J. wraps the wiring, shoves it into the hole, and leaves for work in Columbus.

We spend most of the week with this:














Later that week, J comes home. We have to get metric bolts and there's a moment at Home Depot where the head-shaking they-don't-make-screws-that-size talk begins. I want to kill someone, but that's usual. We wind up going with two bolts. Back out come the two ladders (but not the wasps). We finally get the new light installed, and it's...well, it's BRIGHT!







I guarantee if you come to our house, not only will you be able to find your way up the steps and to the door, but you can probably arrive from outer space and know which house is ours. It lights up the Beer-varian Flag like a beacon for weary warriors .




I'm going to figure out why the little green cottage light doesn't work, and hopefully install it on the back of the house, where there is an obviously not-original light hanging. I won't feel one bit sentimental getting rid of it.

...and I will call him...

Scraggles!















Scraggles came to me free from the remnants of an Earth Day celebration at the University. Some students had a booth set up with a ton of plants and bushes. I'm not sure of the purpose, unless it was to show plants and bushes to people who have never before seen a plant or a bush. If they were trying to sell them, they failed miserably. At the end of the day, there were still a ton of plants and bushes and so they gave them away. I grabbed this guy, a shrubbery that I will now call Scraggles. I moved him into a new terracotta pot, and hopefully he will grow more gratefully than those two lousy bums I planted at 314 last year. They gave up and died after a couple of months.

If you think it's odd I've named a shrub, perhaps someday Jeffrey will introduce you to Bob Marley, the Boston fern.