Katie S. 28

There is nothing that gets under my skin quite like an unfinished project does.  At this point the tiling is done, the quarter round is done, the chair rail is done, the bead board is done and the new drains are installed.  All of these tasks were on Chris’ to do list and he did them beautifully (save for a minor issue involving tile spacers, but really, its barely noticeable).  The only items left on his task list are installing the replacement faucets and shower head, and framing the mirror.

My task list was very short by comparison.  My jobs were to pick out and purchase the materials, putty and paint all the wood, seal the grout, and recaulk the shower.

That last one (which also happens to be the very first task I tackled) might very well be the death of me.  I carefully followed each and every step by the book (right down to waiting a full three days to make sure the newly cleaned joints were dry before recaulking), but to no avail.  Within three days of declaring the shower ready for use, it started leaking.  I did my best to redry the joint and repair the leak.  Then a week later another one sprung from the other side of the shower.  I patched that one up with slightly less care than the last one and waited to see what would happen next.  After another two days the thing was leaking out of three more places at which point I just went hog wild with the caulking gun, gooping the stuff all over every possible orifice, paying no attention to aesthetics whatsoever.

And yet the leaking continues! I am ready to surrender.  Buy a new shower door, hire a plumber, start taking only baths…I just can’t take the leaking any more!!!!

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I am NOT the do it yourselfer I hoped I would be.

So I’ve been neglecting my blog (shamelessly) for a while now.  I am doing this because a) writing anything cohesive and/or coherent seems terribly daunting and b) I have exactly 61 spam comments that I need to delete and that makes me crazy.

I still have absolutely no confidence in my ability to write anything that is co-anything right now so I’m reverting back to my old faithful list format.

1) My Bible study started back this morning and I couldn’t be more excited.  The women are all lovely and Beth Moore’s hair was even bigger than last semester, so that seems promising.

2) Bennett has had another stomach virus.  If Corbin gets is again I am relocating to St. John.

3) We are tiling our master-bathroom.

4) I should mention  here that we haven’t started any actual tiling yet.  Our labors to this point have mostly involved tearing out badly stained laminate, finding what I was convinced was mold on the sub-floor, freaking out about the presence of said perceived mold on the sub-floor, consulting with a contractor who assured me that what I thought was mold was actually just a thin layer of wood rot on the sub-floor, sanding and bleaching said wood rot on the sub-floor, and letting it dry for a full 48 hours as per the instructions of the aforementioned contractor.

5) I now suspect that perhaps we are not quite the master do it yourselfers that I had originally imagined us to be.

6) I have discovered a wonderful new tea flavored alcoholic beverage called Firefly. It mixes wonderfully with lemonade and is best enjoyed after say, a long evening spent tearing out laminate flooring.

Its pretty common knowledge that there are maintenance costs involved in home ownership.  In the three years since we have taken possession of our home we have replaced most of the kitchen appliances, all of the light fixtures and door knobs and painted almost every room.  We were not surprised when we had to hire someone to replace the coils on our garage door opener, and we did not balk at the cost when the guy who came out to fix the air conditioning gave us our bill.  But last week we incurred a home maintenance cost that we absolutely, positively, never in a million years, could not have anticipated.

That unexpected cost (as you’ve probably gathered from the title of this post) was a bee keeper.  It seems that a swarm of honey bees has built a rather large hive in the joist over our kitchen window, and no amount of spray, tampering and otherwise life risking efforts from my ‘do it yourself hubby’ can convince the little buggers to relocate.  Enter the bee keeper.  This particular gentleman is an associate of my mother in law’s who knows just about everything you could ever want to know about honey bee culture.  He has informed us that the bees will not bother us unless we mess with their house – at which point they will become terribly hostile.  So the only safe way to extract the bee population from their kitchen club house is to lure them out with honey.

So Mr. Bee Keeper has constructed a 12 foot high, rather elaborate home away from home complete with netted tubing right in our very own back yard.  Assuming his plan works and the bees do choose to relocate, he will then remove the existing hive and block the point of entrance.  He will then take the bees (who in theory will be happily nestled into their new make shift home) back to his farm where he will profit from their honey.  And all of this for the low low price of $300!  I mean we were going to buy a new oven this month, but bee removal is just so much cooler, don’t you think?

We’ve been doing a little home improvement around the Songer house lately. Coming into the process we each had our own ideas about what would best compliment the space and really represent us as a family, thus we have each selected our own areas of the house to update. For my part, I decided to focus on the master bedroom and bathroom. I repainted both rooms, replaced the ceiling fan and the outdated light fixture, (with Chris’ help of course) put up a few shelves and added some candles and silk flowers for ambiance. I also may or may not have put several quarter sized holes in the wall in the process (one due to a perfectly innocent misunderstanding about what “drill into the stud” meant, and another due to a blind rage brought on by a loose towel rack that had been tightened at least three times.) You won’t be seeing the finished product on HGTV or anything, but its an improvement none the less.

Bingley’s approach to decorating was a bit more artistic in nature. He feels that in order to create a true sense of flow in an opulent estate such as ours, one must bring a taste of the outdoors in. He has achieved this goal in the family room by using the “writhing” technique. Each time we take him outside, he stashes tiny bits of grass, mulch and leaves in his fur, he then “writhes” around on the carpet in such a way that the debris becomes embedded deeply into the carpet creating a lovely marbleized look. He then shakes the remainder of his materials onto the hardwood entryway and stairs, giving one the feeling of walking along a heavily wooded trail…in our living room. The entire process is just so organic and haphazard that its beautiful. He’s really a bit like Jackson Pollock, if Jackson Pollock had the ability to lick his own butt.

Corbin, not surprisingly, has chosen the upstairs area for his renovations. His ideas for the space involve a sort of organized, or even disorganized chaos in which one can create and explore. His first task was to challenge the sense of function and tradition that previously existed in the space by pulling all of the games and VHS tapes off of the office area shelves and arranging them in a maze like configuration on the floor. (Who still has a shelf of VHS tapes you may be asking yourself…the Songers, that’s who.) Corbin’s decorating style really involves all of the senses. Forgoing the oh so overused scents of vanilla or lavender, Corbin has chosen to use whole milk drippings on the carpet and Huggies “surprise sachets” in his bedroom to immediately invoke one’s sense of smell as they enter the space. He has also appealed to the sense of touch by rubbing bits of bread and cracker crumbs all over the bonus room furniture. The gritty, grainy texture of the room now gives one the sense of being on the beach, or in the bottom of a box of Cheerios.

Being the man of the house, Chris settled on the garage as his space. Now as many of you know, my husband is an artist who is currently working in the field of web design. Calling on his design background, Chris chose to utilize a sense of “perfect balance” in order to create a zen-like atmosphere in the garage. For instance, in front of our two cars, he has placed two lawn mowers, facing one another. Its like a perfect mirror image. Except that one of them is more that 30 years old and doesn’t work. On one side of the lawn mowers he has placed two table saws (never used) facing one another. On the other side he has placed two outdated, unusable computers, which, it seems relevant to mention, have been acquired from various friends and family members with the promise to turn the relics into servers or slave drives. These dominant elements are flanked on either side by a series of equally numbered, half empty paint cans, tool boxes and automobile related items. The one major design challenge that Chris faced in his space was that he only had one broken weed eater to hang on the far wall. But never one to shy away from a challenge, he decided to improvise. Our next door neighbor, Fernando, had a broken old weed eater that Chris convinced him he could fix. So now the borrowed broken weed-eater hangs proudly next to its partner…the owned broken weed eater. Perfect balance has been achieved. Its zen, its equilibrium, its messy and completely dysfunctional, but hey, I didn’t choose the garage so I don’t get to complain.