How's Robb?

... How cute is our kitchen?   Damn Cute.  Damn Right, It's Cute.  Ain't no Denyin' that Cute.  Hell, Yeah....   Okay, now that I've gotten all that celebratory blaspheming out of my system, let's take a glance into the next room.  Built (presumably) as a breakfast nook, this cramped alley of a room had earned itself the depressing-but-accurate nickname, The Crap Dumping Room.  This poor room.  We had no idea what to do with it.  Pardon the rotten photo. It's the only one I have. All of the jam we've made, all of our home made wine, and all of our honey was piled in disgraceful heaps.  Older houses have limited storage space.  But let's face it, we looked like hoarders. The other day, someone at work was throwing away a particularly disreputable work table.  I grabbed it before it was chucked into the dumpster.  I stripped off a layer of oily filth, metal shards and grimy paint.  I primed and painted the ta

...   Here's hoping that all of our blog visitors in the US have a lovely Thanksgiving.  Robb and I are thankful for so many things.  I originally started this blog when Robb had his spinal cord injury. It was a way to keep family and friends informed.  It also protected me from the emotionally exhausting exercise of having to answer the same difficult questions, over and over again.  Since that time, we've recorded our achievements and challenges.  We've written about big issues and lots of little silly things that caught our fancy.  We've enjoyed the company of so many wonderful blog visitors. Thanks, everyone! Now, go eat some pie.

... What are you doing this Saturday afternoon?  If you're near Oakland, come on over to our place.  We'll be hosting a very relaxed open house party.  2208 41st Avenue, Oakland Take the 580 Route, 880 is nasty 1 - 6pm Bring Pie

... The earlier part of the week brought a much-needed rainstorm, which is now blasting eastward across the country.  The day after the rain stopped was dazzlingly sunny.  And then the winds came. We had the most dramatic and sustained windstorm that I've ever seen in California. It blew from dinnertime until dawn, knocking down branches and trees and interrupting electrical service all over the area.  We lost a few mid-sized branches, and all of the leave from our fruit trees.  The persimmon always carries fruit longer than leaves, but this doesn't typically happen overnight. The good news is that our little house held up quite well.  We could feel the whole structure shaking at times, which was disconcerting.  Thankfully, the wind and rain didn't come at the same time, because if they had the damage would have been much worse. The wind blew down most of the fruit from our wee Desert King fig tree.  And then I think the squirrels absconded with the windfal

.... Here's what our kitchen looked like when we bought our house.  Charming, but basically a mess. The ceiling was particularly unsavory. It was pretty demoralizing living in the middle of a construction site. There's still a lot of work to do, but things are finally looking better. I'm no longer ending my days muttering "kill me, now" so that's an improvement.

... I honestly don't know how people who own those huge Victorian houses do it.  Robb and I live in a tiny bungalow, and seem to have been working on the restoration of our modest little kitchen for the past three months.  Admittedly, the kitchen was an utter wreck when we started.  We're scraping away over eighty years of paint, and trying to improve some badly maintained walls. Saturday was a lost day for me, as I had some vile stomach ailment.  Sunday was much better. In the upper photo, you can see Linguine supervising the "cutting in" of the wall and ceiling paint. And here are some more things, primed white.  We haven't worked on our kitchen doors, because we're using them as actual doors.  You know, to keep all the dust somewhat contained. I'm not entirely thrilled with the color of the walls and ceiling.  I'm going to have a chat with the folks at my beloved paint store. The color they sold me doesn't match the color in

... Even if we're approaching this project in a really bizarre order, we know that our execution is top-quality.  Robb and I have always made a great team, especially when it comes to painting. But man-oh-man, this is tedious work.  We could never afford to pay anyone to do this job, with the level of attention we're giving it.  Having said that, we've decided that "good enough" is good enough for the horrible wall behind our stove, for right now.  We need to address the tangled mess of our stovepipe, and ultimately tear that entire wall apart.  And we're not interested in prolonging the kitchen chaos, at the moment.  We'll get the wall tidied up, and paint it blue.  And then we'll research our options, and make this a project for another time.

... Our kitty Linguine went to see the veterinarians yesterday.  We were following up on some strange symptoms she had been exhibiting a while back. Our cat is yellow.  Her gums are yellow.  Her skin is yellow.  The whites of her eyes are yellow.  She is showing all the signs of acute liver disease. Except that she isn't. The vets are baffled.  Linguine should be a very sick cat, with low energy and no interest in food.  But what the vets saw was a hilariously active, affectionate cat with luxurious fur.  They saw a cat who climbed all over them, and who is a bit of a chow-hound.  They saw an apparently healthy cat with elevated bilirubin levels. For the moment, Linguine is on anti-inflammatory medication, as well as (I think) medicines for her gall bladder.  It's all very mysterious, and I won't pretend that I'm not worried.

... While we've been toiling away on our kitchen restoration, our persimmon tree has been ripening.  The leaves have turned to glorious flame. I picked these persimmons on Sunday, but I haven't actually tasted them yet. (Update: I enjoyed a feast of delicious fruit at work for lunch today.) This year's crop had some kind of issue with mealybugs under the leaf-like structures on the top of the fruits.  (Bracts? Is that the name?) I suspect this means we'll have use more care than usual when we scrub gift-fruits. Probably because of the insect population, there is also a healthy community of spiders on our persimmons. I'm not afraid of spiders, but fast-moving creatures unexpectedly running across my hands can make me jump across the kitchen. The green fruits are pineapple guavas, which grow across the street from where I work.  They fall to the ground when they ripen.  Apparently only the local squirrels and I are willing to collect these unusual and deli

... It's Sunday morning, and I'm heading in to work, to get a few more coats of paint on some panels for a stage floor that needs to be installed on Monday.  Each of these panels measures four feet by eight feet.  I've filled my studio, twice. I did the math, and the total area of painted floor panels is almost three times the footprint of my entire house.  Here's our kitchen, in morning light.  We have an awful lot more work to do.  But we are progressing, which is nice. It's a good thing I enjoy painting!

... Today I primed the ceiling of our kitchen, as well as most of the walls.  I used a tinted primer.  It has all the same colorants as the ultimate paint we'll be using, but is not as deeply tinted. I skipped a few walls, notably the one that the stove is on, because they turned out to need a bit more work.  Before we moved in, some genius ripped the original plaster off the the wall behind the stove (probably to install the Hideous Stovepipe).  They replaced the plaster with laughably too-thick sheetrock/drywall, which they slathered with spackle in attempt to disguise how poorly it fit.   It's a miserable eyesore. And at some point, I'm going to rip the whole thing out and teach myself how to apply traditional plaster.  I'm really looking forward to learning this skill.  Plaster is a Thing of Beauty.  Entirely unlike drywall. Robb had the windows out while I was working.  He primed the outsides.  We thought we had  plenty of exterior primer, but it t

... The cabinets are painted and the drawers and doors are installed!!!! Robb and I are so pleased. We stand in the kitchen and grin like fools. We do that anyway, of course. But now we're grinning at the cabinets, in particular. Robb has been sanding our ceiling over the course of the past week.  He built himself a very stable platform, with safety rails.  His paralyzed feet aren't really safe on ladders, so this is a very good work-around. One of the requirements for our type of mortgage was that the house couldn't have any cracks or peeling paint.  (I assume this was a lead-safety issue.)  The sale was being handled by a panel of lawyers appointed by our county.  The lawyers hired a team of painters to scrape and caulk the walls, but nobody actually supervised these painters.  (I know this because I stopped by the house while painting was ongoing -- with my own team of painters who wanted to see the place.)  The painters did a good job at first, but by the e

I thought I'd share just a few of the images that I've been looking at for inspiration for our kitchen.  As usual, Robb and I are following the lead of our house, and trying to re-create the colors that were originally used.  Our cabinets are a sort of robin's egg blue, and it seems that the walls were a dusty middle-value navy blue.  That blue shows up frequently in photos of kitchens from the 1940s. 1944, wartime advertisement showing a woman making the purchasing decisions for her home. 1930s, judging by her dress.  Dishwashers (which we won't be getting) were invented in the 1880s. Another one from the 1940s. I love the strange perspective and composition. My next decision is going to be our kitchen curtains. Are these ones wonderfully bold? 1939.  I wish we could still buy flooring like this, nowadays it's beige, tan and more beige.   Robin's egg blue appliances.  We priced custom-colored fridges.  And we ca

... All this past weekend, I was giving myself a little pep-talk.  If we could get the kitchen project far enough along, we could hang the doors when I got home from work on Monday.  All the work and the grime and the tedium would be worth it, because -- finally -- some part of our kitchen would look really nice. As we unloaded the pieces from my car, one of my insane neighbors set off a volley of professional-grade fireworks. It all seemed very auspicious. We had previously cleaned the paint off the original hinges, and carefully saved the original screws.  Once the car was unloaded, I set about re-attaching the hardware to the doors. And it became immediately clear that we would not be hanging doors tonight.  The hinges barely moved, and easily a third of the screws were unusably stripped. We got two doors hung -- badly.  I threw a little tantrum. We had dinner and a beer. And then we realized that historic restoration did not require us to use crappy hardwar

... Smog lounges on our backyard table After a two-week vacation, spent scraping paint off of my 1940's era kitchen, I'm back to work painting scenery for the theater.  I can't believe I thought we'd be done with the kitchen in a week, and then leave town for some recreational fun.  I clearly over-estimated our paint-scraping abilities.  I did take my birthday "off" but due to a dramatic windstorm, and general exhaustion, we spent the day quietly at home.  Robb bought me a pile of books, and I was more than happy to spend the day reading. When we bought our house, the back garden was a massive tangle of tree-consuming vines.  I remind myself of that fact whenever I start wallowing in negative thoughts about how everything looks.  Our soil has the texture of hardened concrete, and the hens are grass-eating maniacs.  So our so-called lawn tends to look a bit sparse. During my vacation, I dug out the summer vegetables that were past their prime.  I a

... Today while I was at my studio working on the drawers and cabinet doors, Robb removed our kitchen windows.  We don't want to use heat to strip the paint on the windows, for fear of cracking our lovely woobly glass.   There were two surprises in this job.  First, how easily the panes could be removed from the rest of the house.  And secondly, that the upper panes were meant to open.  We had no idea that this was possible.  It turns out that our windows had been painted shut for years and years. Judging by the way the paint was layered on, Robb guesses that the upper parts of our kitchen windows had been painted shut for sixty-five years. We're using horribly corrosive chemical strippers, which do an astonishingly good job, and will dissolve right through human flesh.  As you can imagine, we only use this method in very particular circumstances. We popped the windows in again at the end of our work-day.  If we hadn't, I would have spent a sleepl

... Tuesday, October 29th Stripping off layers of crummy old paint, sanding. Thursday, October 31st Stripping paint continues, priming begins. Saturday, November 2nd The first completed drawers are set in place. Priming and actual painting continues. A ghostly Linguine stands near the back door.

... This is awesome.   Even if you don't care about quilting, watch the video to enjoy NASA Astronaut's mesmerizing hair.   In space, no one can hear you seam.  

... Thanks to the kitchen painting project, the dining room is in total disarray. And the kitchen? The kitchen is drunk.

... Our Kitchen.   We've gotten the main wall of cabinets completely stripped and sanded.  I've started priming the insides and exterior supports.  I've gotten most of the cabinets near the sink stripped.  (The area under the sink was too disgusting to attempt, yesterday.  I'm going to need to work up the energy to face that hideous mess.)  I started stripping the wood around the windows.  We'll have to remove the actual windows to work on them.  I'm more than a little afraid of cracking the vintage glass. At my studio, the cabinet doors and drawers continue along.  I'm a bit worried about the color, because it seems zippier than the paint swatch.  Oh well, it's only paint. If we hate it, we can always paint over it.  Perhaps in 2047. We hung up the Hellmouth again this year.  I wanted to paint something new, but bronchitis and the kitchen project got in the way. Robb bought paper lanterns, and I found led lights to go inside them. Don