The Office - Take 2 - Day 4

Day four. The last day of the long weekend, the last day for progress in strides rather than wiggles. Day four, and finally the drywall patches are dry and we can prime and paint.

I took some photos of the wall after it was primed, but they looked just like every other photo. I tell you the room is green. We are not crazy. In the image below you can kind of tell that the ceiling is also green. I kid you not, they painted this entire room, every blessed square inch in that horrible, sickly, crazy-making, green-tinted white monstrosity. But now, now it is a warm color, a nice, subtle tan with just a hint of orange. I know what you must be thinking, but the hint or orange is so way better than the hint of green. Mostly because it is hinting while in an actual color, rather than hinting behind white. Hinting and sneering. I was so excited that I took this shot after just a few minutes of painting.


While I was busy applying the first coat, SPF was busy continuing with the new drywall edges in the window frame. So nice. Our drill only ran out of battery once. Good little drill. Good little husband.


The finished product. (Sort of, this is after one coat. I know not because you can see defects, but because it is still light outside.)


And the other wall as well. So much progress! And I only had to wait four hours to recoat. I know, that seems like a long time, right? Well, considering when I started the first coat on the first wall and when I finished the first coat on the second wall, I only had to wait three hours. Awesome, right?


So. Pretty.


Once he was done with the drywall installation he attacked the joint compound. At this point I was upstairs and blogging the first of these blogs, cleaning out my tools, and stretching my incredibly sore muscles. When he was done, he invited me down to look at it.


But it turns out that someone else had looked at it first. It wasn't difficult to figure out what had happened.


Nor difficult to find the perpetrator.


SPF immediately repaired the paw marks because the mud was still wet, but the second that he opened the door again, our other little girl ran in and went straight for the window sill. Exposed, helpless, vulnerable. Poor little window sill. I work in this office almost every day. Usually both of the girls are in there with me. They get up on the window sill maybe once every three days for a second or two before deciding that the fun is really in sitting on my open computer while I am trying to retouch images or walking on the desk in front of my face while I am trying to type. So it makes total and complete sense that both of them, within minutes of each other, would sneak into the room and immediately try to climb onto the sill. Yep.

The Office - Take 2 - Day 3

Update number three on "the progress." Day three was a highly productive day, but now that I am seeing the images here, it doesn't actually look like much. It was, trust me.

Let me try and convince you.

First, the drywall patches weren't quite dry - still - but that didn't stop me from preparing for the actual painting. So I put tape up across the ceiling, plastic on the floor, and started to twiddle my thumbs.


SPF, on the other hand, was busy finishing off the demo of the weird archway and replacing the rounded corners with fresh drywall patches. Tasty!!


Ahhh, cornerbead. These lovely little metal additions are going to change our stupid room to an amazing, modern, crisp, sharped-edged wonder. Love. Them.


I didn't take a ton of pictures during this phase because I was busy applying the drywall tape and joint compound over the new corner pieces. It is a fantastic job that can be quite messy and tiring on sore and not very highly used muscles, but it was so worth it. Even though the mud isn't dry in this shot, you can already see the glorious, glorious edginess of our new walls. Nailed it.


In the mean time, back when I was still twiddling my thumbs, I removed all of the books from bookshelf number two, which at this point had been moved into the center of the room to allow access to wall number two, and SPF helped me move the shelf itself into the bedroom so that I could refill it in its new home. This helps because it gave me something to do and it also provided some aforementioned much needed wall space in the office. A different perspective of the new bookshelf locations. (It isn't as crowded as it appears from here. It's actually pretty nice having something in this room on that wall.)


And while I was slathering mud on the archway, SPF was busy demoing and cutting new drywall for the window edges. So nice.


And if I still haven't convinced you that we worked all day, let me add that we went out to breakfast, went to Home Depot, and saw Terminator: Salvation. But we worked so hard that we couldn't go to dinner before the movie at the steakhouse we were going to go to, but went to Rubio's instead, only they were closed because it was so late at night, so we ended up getting hot dogs in the theater. (So, does that help or hurt my argument?)

The Office - Take 2 - Day 2

In yesterday's blog I mentioned that we were having a space problem with all of the new stuff that I had accumulated in Santa Barbara that was now being introduced to San Diego. One of the items found its home fairly quickly because it used to live here before I moved. My letter desk quickly nestled against its familiar wall where it is out of the way but still functional while at the same time adds some much needed personality to the room. That got me to thinking.


Even though the rest of the room is crazy crowded and makes no sense, there is room on that one wall at the foot of the bed. The room is crowded temporarily because the futon that was my couch up in Santa Barbara is now wedged between my side of the bed and our dresser. There is barely room to walk, and if I need access to the dresser, I have to drag and push the futon until I get a tiny bit of clearance in the drawers. Not the ideal situation. But, then again, we are rearranging the office to accommodate the futon, so some things have to come out of the office no matter what.


The nice thing is that bookshelves take up a lot of wall space, but not a large footprint. So two of the bookshelves have been slated to move to this room to free up the wall in the office while also providing something to look at, as well as defined "wall space", in the bedroom. The nice thing about defining the wall space is that I can hang some of our numerous paintings, photos, drawings, and posters back on the walls. The painting in the image above I hung just shortly after moving back down because it seemed to fit perfectly in the new bedroom. Not only was it a good size for the available space, its frame matches the hardwood furniture and the color scheme of the painting itself matches the new paint color on the walls. Serendipitous, but not planned.


The next stage was to prepare the office for painting. We moved all of the heavy and large objects off of the left wall in preparation to prime and paint that wall. There was a small, but not insurmountable, hole in the wall where SPF had done some phone line repairs. It needed to be patched, which I did right away, but the dry time of the joint compound pushed back our timeline for the painting. I patched the other random nail holes, staple punctures, scuffs, and scars in the wall and we went to the zoo. As a side note, the San Diego Zoo just opened up a new exhibit called Elephant Odyssey that spans nearly the whole eastern side of the zoo with a huge area for the elephants to walk, play, and swim. Yes, swim. They have an elephant sized pool at the end of the exhibit. Freaking awesome.


When we got back, we returned to the demolition of the archway. The patch in the wall was still not entirely dry (it was fairly thick) and so we watched Young Guns II and Galaxy Quest to close out the day before hitting the sack. Don't judge. The benefit of doing your own remodeling is that the workers are on your schedule.

Fear not, we ramped it up in the next two days.

The Office - Take 2 - Day 1

I know, I know. You are all thinking, didn't you just finish the office?? Well, yes and no. Since the office reorganization in January, quite a lot has happened. The most major event would be that I moved out of my Santa Barbara apartment and back down to SD full time. This is a big deal for a lot of reasons, not only that I get to spend more time with my husband or that I am unemployed or that I stay home all day, but that all of my accumulated stuff from up there is now down here. If you recall, when we did the original reorganization of the office (and subsequent remodel of the office closet) it was to better utilize the space that we had, which was minimal. Now we have to fit another 300 sq ft of life into this place. A life that I lived in SB for three years. I lived fairly thinly up there, but I did grow to fit the space.

The main obstacles that we have to incorporate into this space would be the futon, the equipment, and all the books. The office closet now accommodates all of the equipment. I know, I'm as surprised as you are. If there was one thing I didn't skimp on when I was in school it was the equipment. So . . . what to do? We felt that another remodel/reorganization was in order.

The starting conditions. (If you look back at The Office blog in January you will see almost the same picture, but with more carpet and less TVs in the middle of the floor.)



One of the things that we realized is that we have hated this room for a long time, for a lot of reasons. The first, which you can't really tell above, but more so below, is that the room is painted this very faint, very sickening shade of white tinted with green. It was subtle, so much so that you actually think you are crazy to think that it is green, but it is. You just know it. In your bones. It is horrid. So, first on the list - repaint the room an awesome color.

The second issue that we have had is that this room has all rounded corners. I don't necessarily have anything against rounded corners. My father's house has them and it is a lovely house. But, my father's house has them consistently, throughout the house, and done well. Ours, not so much. This is the only room with rounded corners, and not every corner even in the room is round. This archway here and the edge around the window are rounded. It is maddening if you are OCD like my husband and I both are. So, second on the list - fix the corners.


And so, yet another project turns from a relatively easy concept (painting) to a full on demo, drywall patching, mud slinging extravaganza. We certainly do know how to balloon our work load. So, the demo begins . . .


Third on the list seems simple enough, but will take some creative thinking. Third is that we need more space in this room. Lots more. Enough to put a futon comfortably against a wall in such a way as it can be utilized as a guest bed. I'll get back to you on that one.

My Garden

I have always been an avid gardener. When I was growing up, my father had bare root rose bushes lining the back wall of the yard. There were maybe ten bushes, all different colors, and one of my favorite summer pastimes was to tend to them.

When SPF and I moved out here, we first had an apartment with a balcony (actually, make that five different apartments with various forms of balconies) but never a yard. Then we moved into a little cottage by the beach that was where we would still be living today had we not been forced to leave when the owner sold. (We would have bought it, mind you, if it hadn't been running 750K. No, I'm not kidding.) The little cottage had an ocean peek and a giant yard filled with a flowering ivy that attracted the most wonderful butterflies and hummingbirds. Along one of the walls, there were also three rose bushes that I tended because the gardening service hired by our landlord seemed only capable of mowing the ratty lawn and trimming the prolific bougainvillea. I loved that cottage.

In a mad panic, however, we were forced to move. Despite our hurried timeline we decided to purchase our own house. Something practical that would be an investment instead of a financial drain. We have been here now for six years. It's main problem - no yard. I started to long for blooming life again and soon bought three pots and three roses. The first, true to any romantic's heart, was the velvet red.


After that I tried various combinations of other flowers and plants, but the only ones that I could manage were the roses. But I tried, none-the-less. When the landslide struck, we were given, to babysit, a sickly jasmine on a climbing lattice. At the time I was under the impression that we would be returning the jasmine to her owner and was so greatly distressed at how poorly she fared under my care. But, my care was limited. Soon after we got her, I went off to school and the maintenance of the garden was left in other hands. The roses and the succulents did fine. The pine tree that started to grow out of an abandoned pot thrived. The little jasmine struggled and choked for life.

A little over a month ago, my mother came out and we decided to do a project to rejuvenate my little, concrete patio and turn it into something living, something comforting and blooming. In a stroke of miscalculation we ended up with too many small flowered plants and in desperation, I planted the remaining Elysium and blue flowers in the pot with the jasmine. Today, they are all thriving.


Around the rest of the garden we planted geraniums, snapdragons, daisies, petunias, impatients, and the fabulous little flowers that look like orchids but are of sturdier making. They are fantastic. Along one wall we are growing our own tomatoes, limes, mint, parsley, and basil. The whole garden is alive with color and the fresh scents of jasmine, roses, lime, and mint, which together make for a bouquet of inviting life.


And invite life, it did. One of the problems with having the garden would be the pests. In this case, my greatest fear. Beneath one of the pots of snapdragons, Elysium, and blue flowers lived the deadliest spider in North America, despite the fact that everyone I know told me that they didn't live in California. In an interesting twist of fate, my fear of this spider in particular was moderated by my desire to get a shot (and proof) of its existence in the way that I could manage to get close enough for this shot while maintaining a safe enough distance to preserve my limbs. The Macro mode on my G10 requires a certain proximity to the subject of choice, and so I am much, much closer to her than I would normally be comfortable with. But alas, the camera functions for so many of us as a kind of courage. It is an instrument set between us and danger. A wall. A barrier. A shield. It doesn't seem to matter that it actually has no real protective integrity.