Category Archives: House

We have a patio! After roughly a week (including two full days when nobody was out there working on it), a portion of the backyard was chopped up and replaced with paving stones. A portion of the fence was moved, and some topsoil/grass seed/fertilizer mix was put down in the backyard. It is no longer the lumpy wasteland it was when we moved in! Hurrah!

We also have a driveway! The disintegrating asphalt was pulled up, a portion of the front yard was peeled back, and after a few terse phone calls to the paving company, the asphalt was put down and is currently roped off. We had to call the landscapers to come get the huge giant dirt pile the pavers had left, but the landscaper is a stand-up guy and didn’t charge us for this service. Yay, because we have given him quite enough money already.

The front garden has been pulled out, and this Sunday I plan to put stuff in the ground. Maybe. Saturday is Passover and we are having between 8 and 12 people, so all day will be given over to that, but Sunday, weather permitting, will be a big outside improvement day.

Photos to come, maybe.

Bleh. I… don’t even have anything coherent to say. This rain and greyness and ick are just making my brain feel like mush.

Maybe this will improve when we get the house painted – the living room is a cave right now which is NOT HELPING. I hate when I have to turn the lights on in the middle of the day. Once we change colors in here, it should be a LOT brighter.

Until then, bleh.

In anticipation of our tax refund (and it should be fairly healthy, given that I didn’t have a job in all of 2006 and we bought the new house), we are about to embark on at least three simultaneous home-improvment projects.

Project #1 is paint. The living/dining room of this house is a horrible, horrible dark khaki-ish color. In a smaller room, it might work well, but in here, it’s just toooooo muuuuuuch, and too dark. The light gets sucked into the walls and it’s like a cave in here. Add on the fact that it’s winter and I have those idiotic compact fluorescents in all the lamps… it’s dark, man. It’s the same color as the carpet, and while I’m okay with the carpet being that color (it… hides stains), the whole room being this shiteous brown is really depressing.

I am going to paint the majority of the walls a very nice buttery cream color. It’s warm and bright without being white, yellow, or [shudder] beige. It is somehow all of these colors at once, which is fine by me. For fun and to break it up a little, I’m painting a couple of the walls a lovely bottle-green color. This way, it will look pretty but not clash TOO terribly much with my awesome purple furniture which I cannot afford to replace just now.

At some point I am going to have to think very hard about window furnishings like drapes and stuff, but I’m not sure the budget will allow for that at the present time. The brown tab-tops and beige sheers I got at Target will have to suffice for now, and luckily for me, they will go just fine with the paint I have picked out.

I was trying to avoid painting the kitchen, too, but since we have to have the [vaulted] ceiling painted, we might as well do the ceiling in the kitchen while we’re at it. And if we’re doing that, we might as well paint the walls in the kitchen. Right now they are a not-unpleasant blue, but the cabinetry is a dark reddish wood, so the kitchen is even more cave-like than the living room is. I’m going to go with a very light, almost white, green and then do the trim in a more interesting green. Eventually, I’d like to do a mosaic backsplash around the work surface area, but that’s crazy-expensive, and again – not in the budget right now.

Outside, even more interesting things are happening. We are going widen our driveway so we can park the cars side-by-side, then we’re going to move the fence up, enclose the porch, and put pavers down to create a patio area. In a couple of years, we might just lose our minds completely and bump out the whole section of the kitchen wall and create a nice dining area there and put a deck off of it.

Not this year, because I don’t think my head could take it, but definitely in the next five years.

We are also considering the possibility of putting a second floor on the back of the house. The front part would stay the way it is because I don’t think anyone wants to mess with a vaulted ceiling, but we could slap a second level onto the back, which would be very nice. We could make the whole thing a GIANT MASTER SUITE or we could have a couple of bedrooms up there and free up some of the rooms downstairs for a playroom/sewing room or whatever. We’ve got lots of possibilities and plenty of time, since This Is Where We Live Now.

It’s funny, thinking that. In the dozen years that Freddie and I have been together, anyplace we have lived has always been temporary. First it was a crappy college apartment witha roommate. Then it was a crappy and Oh My God How Tiny post-college apartment with the most awesome 1970’s turquoise appliances. Then we lived in Indy, then our teeny apartment in Metuchen, then the slightly larger apartment across the courtyard in Metuchen, then the gigantic apartment in North Brunswick, then the townhouse, and now here. Until we got here, we always viewed our residence as “this will do until we get a bigger apartment/buy a townhouse/buy a house.”

Well, now we’ve bought the house. It has all the things we wanted in a house. It has the three bedrooms we wanted. It has a basement. It has a yard. It’s in a town with good schools and a train station. Everything. Of course, the house itself is quirky (if we’re being charitable) but that’s a good thing because the things that need to be repaired/upgraded can be done to our standards. Fun! But it’s weird that we no longer look at this as temporary. We’re not just living here for a couple years until we upgrade to a bigger house. This Is Our House, and the long-term plans are starting to be made.

I like to go to extremes with the plans. We have a bay window in the front, which is probably original to the house (1962) and needs to be replaced eventually. So why not push out the whole front wall? Whoops, vaulted ceiling. Never mind. But I can bow the window out a bit more and create a window-seat area which would be very nice. And someday I might just decide to yank up all the carpet and see if there is hardwood underneath. There probably isn’t but you never know.

Just wait until I get going on the garden. Talk about big plans!

I’ve always thought of myself as a bit of a slob. Indeed, my approach to housekeeping can be described as “somewhat lax.” This annoys Freddie sometimes, but he has to remember that he was raised in a more or less sterile environment (very clean and utterly devoid of personality), and I was raised by hippies. You do the math.

However. There is always a ‘however,’ isn’t there?

Slob I may be, but I am quite capable of keeping the house from becoming filthy.

The previous owners of our new house were apparently incapable of doing this. The more I clean the place, the more grossed out I am at just how disgusting the house is. For instance, I cleaned the oven on Saturday. When I opened it up to wipe out the insides, I noticed that the hinges of the doors were full of that greasy dust you tend to see on an oven that hasn’t been cleaned in DECADES. And, had this oven been decades old, I wouldn’t have batted an eyelash.

This oven? Is not quite four years old. Color me grossed out. The window on the top oven (it’s a double) is so grimy, it is impossible to see in when baking. How the hell does this happen? I cooked like a slob in our previous house for three years and only cleaned the oven ONCE and it wasn’t even a tenth as gross as this one is. I am just baffled as to how it got this way. Were they baking caramels or something?

I’m tempted to just replace the oven, but that just isn’t in the budget at the present time.

Same deal with the fridge. The inside was a mess, which is to be expected, but the outside was all nasty, too. The fronts of the cabinets need to be cleaned in a very big way, which I will probably do in the next few weeks. It’s just gross.

And don’t get me started on the outside. The backyard is destroyed, since they had two dogs penned in there. There is a worn track going from one side of the house to the other and if we can ever get grass to grow there, I’ll be shocked.

The front was apparently “professionally landscaped” at some point (this was noted in the real estate listing, too), but it was never ever maintained. I spent a good part of yesterday with my clippers hacking down a beautiful but out-of-control butterfly bush, cursing all the while. I was merciless, and I think I’m going to make Freddie buy me a saw so I can chop down some of the bigger branches and try to shape it a little more. If it dies, it dies. I’ll put something else in there.

Today’s project is the rest of the front landscaping. It is seriously out of control and I think I’m just going to hack it all down and see what survives.

I know it’s rare to buy a house and have everything be exactly how you want it, but this is just… let’s just say the way this house was kept makes my housekeeping (or lack thereof) look like Martha Stewart-level housekeeping. I literally throw up my hands and curse the previous owners a couple times a day.