Tag Archive | personal: house

Sleddddddd (a blog post)

Jan3

Hello all!  It’s wintertime!

And I have a SLED!

Have I mentioned this sled before?

I mean, it’s nothing exciting; it’s a plastic molded sled of the sort you buy your kid so they can go down the hill, or at least it’s really similar to the one I had to go sledding downhill at the nearby park (Rochester is on the plain that used to be in Lake Ontario, so the option is the park with a hill (which may have been manufactured, I never asked) or… well, that’s about it.  In Ithaca, I could sled half my commute, if I was feeling daring.)

What it is, for me, is just about the size of the totes we use to haul firewood.  Continue reading →

What I Did on My Summer (not-really-Vacation)

Sep15

So, let me tell you about my summer!

🌞

So far, Summer 2017 has involved medical foo, home renovations, surprise!funeral and not-a-surprise godbaby.

Medical Foo I have blogged a bit about in That Was Spinal Tap and That Was Spinal Tap Two.  I’ve also fic’d and freewrote about it in Diagnostic Machine and Just A Little Structural Rot.

The long and the short of it: After more doctor visits, blood tests, and spinal taps than seems reasonable or even probable (and two MRIs), I have a diagnosis and will start drug treatment soon.  It’s not a thrilling diagnosis, but, to quote Arnold, it’s not a tumor. (It’s not a baby either.  I don’t think they’d need a spinal tap to tell that one).

I now have three weeks without blood draws or doctor visits, and if my dentist calls, I’m going to tell them I’m out of the country for a while.  Or something.  No more co-pays kthnxbai.

Did I really just say kthnxbai?  Please forgive me.   Continue reading →

Patreon Posts!

Aug14

🚧

This week on our 1870’s farmhouse, we’re demolishing the ceiling(s) of the bathroom!

The first thing to do was pull out all the old insulation – and junk – from the attic side.  After our homeowners (us) pulled out eight or nine garbage bags of old cellulose insulation…

Take a Peek!

Originally posted April 15, 2013.  

α

It all began with the first of us, called, as was appropriate and due, the Alpha.

I never knew what other name the Alpha might have held, before this place, before Everything Else. But sometimes we called her Anna, or Angie, when we were being informal.

Read On!

Speaking of Magical dates…here is the Day of Magic in Fae Apoc!

 🎃

In the world of the Faerie Apocalypse – Addergoole, Doomsday, etc. – there is something that is colloquially called The Blindness of the Gods, and something called a Mask.

Read On!

Dragons next Patreon

Jul28

⛳
“Fore!… Damnit! I don’t know what’s up with me today, Jim, I just can’t swing a damn stick!”

Open to all Patreons!

Originally posted Aug. 10, 2011

🛒

I think it’s fair that I thought Farnah was male.

Read On!

This week on What an Old House, we’re doing some exploratory demolition in our 1860’s farmhouse’s bathroom.

🏠

Now this bathroom has some interesting features right from the get-go. You can see from the photos that the entire bathroom was covered in these 50’s-era Masonite panels.

Take a Peek!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1355606.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Weekend, Weekend WEEKEND (A weekend blog)

Jul17

This weekend was busy! In the fun way, albeit not the productive way

Friday night, I had dinner with [personal profile] kelkyag and [personal profile] sauergeek, who happened to be “passing through” (within an hour of me), at one of my favorite Finger Lakes restaurants, Stone Cat. We plotted and talked fiction and families and many other things, and then, oops, it was 10, so we departed.

Saturday, T. and I went to the Canandaigua Craft festival, where T> bought me an amber necklace and earrings and I bought me two more pairs of earrings from my new favorite local craft show earring vendor.

Then we took longer than planned to finish the drive, which ended at Capriox’s & Talkian’s house for a baby! shower! Baby shower! That was the chillest, most comfy pool-party/picnic/baby shower I have ever been to, and I have dozens of geeky baby onesie ideas in case another one of my geek friends has a baby.

(My contribution, along with some knitted burp cloths ‘cause nothing else got finished, was a John Deere onesie and slipper-socks.)

THEN T & I went to a tile store, because we could not find a kitchen & bath place that was open, and looked at almost every tile layout in the place (Kitchen semi-redo and bathroom redo are on our to-do list for the next year). We asked the nice tile people for a recommendation for dinner, and ended up at a neat Korean place hidden in the Regional Market. Whee!

Drive drive drive, home home home, sleep sleep sleep… WINE FEST!

The Finger Lakes Wine Festival is held every year at the Watkins Glen raceway, and we have been meaning to go for years. We pretty much know every winery on the two lakes closest to us — but the Watkins Festival pulls from the Erie trail and the Niagara escarpment, the 1000 Islands and the Hudson Valley (I just described a line encircling the sides and top of the state, for those unfamiliar).

We drank so much wine. And whisky. And cider. And gin. And wine, wine, wine. We were there from about 10-3, bought 11 bottles of wine, and have tons of notes — all of it about wineries we’ve never been to before!

AND we got to talk to two vintners. That was pretty awesome. Asking questions about how Erie and Niagara Rieslings taste different from Seneca ones did the trick! (It almost always does).

Then we went home and napped for two hours.

My pinboards for kitchen and bath are getting full of ideas. I am super excited about all of that.

And I have So Much Wine.

Also, everything baby-related is adorable.

…wow.

How was YOUR weekend?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1351145.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Cave Renovations

Aug9

There is a room in our house off the living room that we call the cave.

It’s approx. 8’x8’x6.6′, off a room that is 14-ish feet wide, and it hides behind the wood stove, so in the winter it’s super warm. My desk is in there, and the armchair where I do the rest of my writing.

But it was painted white-over-yellow-over green with awful wallpaper, the walls were a mess, and there was a door leading into the wall, about 1.5’x2′ in size, that just looked ugly (It was, before they sided the house, a door for throwing firewood in). There’s also awful awful awful linoleum, but since we’re going to later drop the floor down to be level with the rest of the living room, we might not fix that just now.

Mom came to visit yesterday, and over the course of approx. 11-4, we replaced the door to nowhere with drywall, removed the wallpaper border, Mom washed… everything (she does that) and we got the first coat of spackle/joint compound on most of the places that needed it.

It already is starting to look better!

Today… more joint compound. And then… more spackle, and the first stages of sanding.

Within 2 weeks… paint! A nice coat of the house color (just-barely-off-white) over everything.

And new switch plates. Lots of new – well, 4, 4 new wall plates.

Hooray!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/967993.html. You can comment here or there.

So, um, Winter.

Feb13

Yesterday, we (mostly Spousal Unit) got to deal with a new facet of home ownership: frozen pipe!

Well, technically, broken pipe due to freezing.

It turns out that one pipe in the utility room (going to the heating system) was originally, or at least as of the last iteration, run just under the threshold of the back door, which tends to be a bit air-leaky. Yesterday was one of those supercold mornings, and thus, by mid-afternoon, Pop!

That was an expense we weren’t expecting.

On a hopefully-less-urgent note, Theocracy has been acting listless and floppy, although he’s still eating and taking in fluids. So vet appt. this afternoon to see what’s up with the fluffer.

So… I’m still taking commissions via my Giraffe Call, although now the funds will go to Unexpected Expenses Fund, February Version.

In happier news, Meritocracy, the adopted little sister of Theocracy and Oligarchy, has discovered catnip and she thinks it’s awesome. She also is fairly certain the tall coyotes (us) are probably not going to eat her, and the fireplace is the most wonderful thing in the world, thanks.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/666166.html. You can comment here or there.

Speaking Of Projects…

Jan8

(as I did here)…

Yesterday, I started and completed (honesty compels me to add: although I will do a few touch-ups today Thursday) a project, which is a little bit of a Big Deal for me (T. pointed out: and I did so within a week of buying the material. Within 4 days, actually!).

Our house is not exactly insulated. I created and hung a curtain on the back door (to be fair, T. had already hung the rod this time) to go along with the one I made last year for the front door (here). All in one evening!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/632076.html. You can comment here or there.

Preliminary Project List

Jan8

I am trying The January Cure; the first step (which I’m late in getting to) is to make a project list

These are NOT the main house-projects (things like “insulate the attic” and “raise the ceiling by 1 foot and a half” and “drop the floor in the card room to be level.” These are one-weekend or less projects I can do, mostly in the cold.

Card Room
Cloth-covered panels for wall
Art on back wall
Carpet on floor
inbox/tidying solution

Living room
DUST
Organization system for the fire pile
fire extinguisher bracket/hang system

Dining Room
Organize/put away bags
Tidy/put away things on standing desk.

Bedroom
under-clothes storage?
Hooks!
Hang mirror

Bathroom
Shelving unit
Cloth panel to cover horrible
New medicine cabinet/light bar
Some sort of system for cat/medicine cabinet

Kitchen
New home for chest
Consistent organized storage for tools.
New home for Stand Mixer
Carpet for walkway
Plants made prettified
fire extinguisher bracket/hang system

Foyer
Everything
Overhead bin framed in
Hooks hung
Door molding installed
Baseboard molding installed
Door possibly installed

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/631935.html. You can comment here or there.