Off Days: Valentine's Day & President's Day

If I'm going to work that hard during the week, I'm definitely taking the weekends off. Particularly holiday weekends.

For Valentine's Day I made chocolate mousse. And for President's Day I made chicken marsala. Both according to cooksillustrated.com, the only online subscription I've maintained. The recipes and advice never fail, and that's saying something!

Kitchen Essential: Lodge Logic 12-inch pre-seasoned cast iron frying pan

Extra plates for assembling ingredients:

Potato mashers, one for each year of marriage:

'80s oak cabinets that will one day be painted or replaced (if not by me then surely by the next owner!).

Plus the five unaired episodes (spoilers) of Defying Gravity = Happy Weekend:

Project 1: The Guest Room: Day 2

Today's jobs:

(1) Ensconce the dresser & chest of drawers in plastic and protect their top surfaces from tossed tools by covering them with old lawn signs from political campaigns. Check.

(2) Scrape all the peeling paint from the part of this wall that's bumped out, and remove the moldings.

Most of the paint came off easily and in big chunks. I always think of my high school boyfriend when I do this sort of work. He had red hair and burned easily in the summer, and I could peel his back in sheets. He was a nice guy.

The doorways into the bathroom from the bedrooms are just under 6 feet high, a full eight inches lower than all the other doorways upstairs. I removed some of the molding around the doorway from the guest room bedroom to see what might be involved in raising the doorways. Decision: Looks entirely possible and not too difficult, but seek professional opinion.

Took almost three hours to get this wall clean -- half a wall really -- which begins to explain why I've procrastinated the job so long. There's a little patch at the bottom I couldn't scrape with any tool, so I fired up the rotary sander. EHN! WRONG! I didn't have the doors closed and the dust cloud spread FAST. Five minutes after I finished it was still hazy, as the pictures show.

Yes, I was wearing a mask and eye protection. But I need a respirator before I do this again. Now I'm going to go hose myself down in the manner of a contaminated nuclear plant worker.

LESSON: Stick with my plan, which is to scrape all the walls and remove all the moldings, buy a respirator, close and tape the doors, and sand all at once.

Project 1: The Guest Room: Day 1

One day I was sitting at the computer and heard a Plop! Didn't think much about it until five minutes later, another Plop! Got up to investigate and discovered that Plop! is the sound salad-plate-sized chunks of multiple layers of paint makes when it disadheres from hundred-year-old plaster and falls to the floor in the guest room.

That was two years ago, and today I have finally started on the fix.

Here's the room. (Pictures taken by iPhone so not the greatest.)

Of course you can't just go in and fix the plaster in a room. First you have to clear the room and, since I was using this room and its adjoining closet as my dressing room, move the clothing. Which means I had to clear out another closet -- the one that adjoins our so-called master bedroom -- to make room for my clothes. Sadly the master bedroom closet is not in good shape either, but I'm not going to tackle it now. I just scraped the peeling paint and crumbling plaster and swept well.

Most of the clothes on the bed came out of that closet and hadn't been worn in several years. I took them to Goodwill this afternoon. I kept a stack of t-shirts and sweatshirts for work clothes.

Here's the guest room closet on the left, in the midst of cleaning it out. The walls had been covered in funky old brown cheap paneling and painted white. I ripped out all the paneling -- took me about 10 minutes -- and wound up with the closet walls on the right.

           

 Here's a closeup of the plumbing in the hole in the wall on the bottom right. There's a bathroom on the other side of this wall, and this is the sink hookup. Good news, because it's leaking and is scheduled for replacement.

When I stopped around 3:00 this afternoon the guest room and its closet were cleared of all but the two big pieces of furniture, and I had a well organized closet in the master bedroom. It'll have to be emptied again to make repairs later, but it's clean and good for now.