Minimumwage Foreclosure

due to mandatory overtime at work currently, i usually am to tired of being at the computer to… be at the computer!

so consider this a 30% chance of update with thundershowers.

lots going on otherwise, so hopefully it’ll all be good news soon (despite the fact the microwave is now screaming when you turn it on and mosquitos are in the yard despite the fact there is no still water anywhere).

hope all is well on your end of things. keep the hope alive!

noir was waiting for the bedding to finish being washed, so she hugged onto one of my scarves until fresh linens were ready.

and how was the dryer fixed? with steven and his dad taking it apart and figuring it out. in all honesty though, the dryer was kind of falling apart when the previous owners left the house (oh… those previous owners make me so angry) so it was no loss to them, but then it seems like they never tried to repair anything or do regular maintenance.  the dryer was already missing one of it’s tumble bars, and another one was loose, and the third seemed okay. it turns out it was the third one that was the problem. a screw that holds it in place had snaked it’s way back  from it’s place and was knocking around on the outer rim of the drum, making that horrible noise and the force was making it rock. they had to totally take out the loose tumbler, but they fixed that one. we are now drying with just one tumbler.  seems to work okay yay for steven and his dad!

so while they were doing that, the goblin was nice enough to get an extension cord out and hook up electric the weed whacker i bought at a yard sale for 5$ and give some of the yard a go. steven then tried to give the lawnmower a go but it kept dying and when the goblin looked in the house, it seems the extension cord was drawing too much power and the breaker needed to be flipped. this happened twice before he gave up and steven cursed at the lawnmower (now working because he’s mowing the yard today on his day off).

at the end of the day, steven and i went to go take a nice refreshing shower together only to find the hot water was quickly becoming cold. the next day steven checks it all out with his father and it seems the hot water heater is working just fine. the goblin had no problems when he took a shower.

but last night, man oh man, it lost it’s scalding hotness again.

like Roseanne Rosannadanna used to say “it’s always something.” oddly enough, my hair looks like hers currently just not as poofy. he he he.

tomorrow will be about the laundry room cabinet i scored from steel rod’s grandmother and how the install went. have a good monday!

okay, so it doesn’t look as all bad as that picture, but last night there was an incident. let me set it up for you:

the guys left to go gaming at a buddies house and i’m munching on dinner and lazing about the house with the dogs when i get the gumption to do like … 5 things at once (which is normal for me. either on idle or full throttle). i get a load of work clothes and undies in the wash and i start making this horrible concoction called a kool aid pie. while doing this, i’m cleaning up here and there around the house and piddling with some commissioned artwork, and picking up a book every few minutes and reading 3 pages at a time (i told you, idle or full throttle). once the pie is in the fridge, the artwork frustrating, and counters wiped, and a chapter ending, i go to put the wash in the dryer.  once done so, i set the time and then hit the button.

the poor dryer moves like the load is unbalanced and is making some horrible noise so i open her up and re-arrange things and close it back and start it up again. i stand and watch with a finger tapping my bottom lip as it continues to make the horrible noise and move side to side. i open it up and can smell some faint burning rubber. i take out half the load and close the door and try again, maybe it was too large despite the fact i honestly didn’t think that. same thing. frustrated i put it all back in and turn it off.

i go to turn the satellite radio onto station 4 (40’s on 4. i love love love me some big band music) and try to think as i pace. eventually i get really sleepy and go lay on the bed reading my book. while reading said book about serial killers, i come to the conclusion it must be a busted belt of some sort. it would explain the faint burnt rubber smell, the horrible noise, AND the wobbling. yes, my mind clears more when it’s busy than when i’m pacing. i fall asleep face first at a diagonal on the bed, drooling on poor steven’s pillow while dogs walk all over me.

the boys come home and i wake up because the dogs love to cause a welcoming commotion. it is their way of saying “i love you! i missed you! oh i missed you! welcome home! love me back!” so i get half awake and inform steven of said dryer affairs. this is where it gets from frustrating to making me mad.

the goblin pipes up with “oh yeah, it’s been doing that. it still dries, you just  got to deal with the noise.” he is named goblin because of such things. this gets steven riled up and i would have been as well of i was more than half asleep.

now i have a dryer full of wet clothes i need for work and all my undies… despite the pair i am currently wearing. oh, the misery and the woe. if it’s not one thing, it’s another. maybe i should put up a laundry line just in case of incidents like this, but do i really want the countryside and rabbits in the feild next door to be able to see all my polka dotted unmentionables? i dare not think so.

so last night while trying to sort through stuff and get the satellite radio connected inside the house, so many things came light. one of them being i had over 13 audio cables for left and right channel, and a whole plastic storage tub full of cables to things i had no idea what they belonged to anymore. another thing came to light was the hardwood floor, though beautiful at one point, is trashed do to the previous owners not really appreciating what a beautiful thing hardwood floors can be.

while sitting on the scraped, abused, roughed up floor and being nearly strangled by audio cord spaghetti, i thought about some of the flooring steven and i spied at home depot, but not lowes. it was click in place wood flooring with a black tint to it, but reflective. seeing as the walls are going to be mostly black, i knew that reflective sheen would be just right for this space. looking at the home depot website, i don’t see such flooring, sadly. i did find the exact same thing on another site, let me show you:

this isn’t quite what we saw, but similar enough. so, while thinking of this, i began to think of other ways to store said radio and audio receiver in a nice manner that could possibly also store other things. at that moment (when swearing profusely at some ac adapter tangled in the mess that i couldn’t fathom what it was supposed to ever go to that we didn’t already have hooked up to something), i thought about a beautiful cabinet i saw at ikea once. it think it would fit beautifully in the feel of the room, so i  got up and pulled it up on the screen to show steven. he agreed it is beautiful and maybe one day we could afford it. i sighed deeply, really tired of day dreaming about one days, but know there is no other way. but man, it would be amazing in the room. take a look!

both steven and i love things that have room underneath them. for me, i like the sense of open space and openness it brings. let us not forget the fact, way easier to clean underneath things that are open below them.

so, that as a cabinet with the audio equipment and then get little shelves (eventually) for the speakers through out the house (currently only four, more will have to happen… eventually).

i get too excited about making things pretty and get frustrated when i don’t have the means to do it when i have the energy and excitement to do it RIGHT THEN. it’s such a flustering realization. it didn’t help matters more that my hand was literally stuck in a jumble of cords at the time and in my frustration i went to shake a mighty fist at the cruel turn of events in which money didn’t fall from the sky to make my humble shack into a beautiful and amazing home, which lead to me hitting myself in the face with the previously mentioned fistful of cords.

ah, life.

a few exciting things to mention that happened over the weekend!

1. steven’s birthday is coming up in two weeks but his present came early! we installed step one of it into his car last night and step two will be done later today! satellite radio!
2. steps are being made to figure out how to make the arcade machine for the arcade room!
3. steven’s grandmother is getting her kitchen re-done, which means i got to pick through old kitchen cabinets!

satellite radio everywhere!

so, for steven’s 28th birthday (august 1st, ya’ll!) i got him a satellite radio receiver, a car kit and an at home kit! how does this fit into the grand scheme of things in the house? well, eventually we’re going to wire the whole house with speakers and plug it between satellite radio and a big mp3 player (i have a massive cd collection) instead of keeping the two 300 cd disc changers i have. when i get home tonight i plan on setting up my very very old stereo system (i got it in 10th grade. over 13 years ago. geeze!) and plugging the satellite receiver up to it so that when we’re not in the car, we can listen to commercial free radio through out the house! i’m very excited because i know steven got excited over it. i love the boy and i love making him happy, but please spare me hours of Hair Nation, please…

this set up will be in a room we call a good handful of different names since nothing has stuck yet: arcade room, heart of the house, the middle room. it is a room smack dab in the middle of the house that we’ll be putting an arcade machine in, housing our vast comic library, and the music center. we’re deciding what exactly we want to do in that room, but it seems like it’ll be mostly black washed walls and dark dark hardwood floors. i might be doing comic and gaming murals on the walls in there, which will be kind of cool (if i may say so myself). it currently houses our comic book collection which i will be bagging and boarding every comic and setting them vertical in a nice shelving unit with tabs for easy finding. currently the only thing on the walls in there now is a piece of artwork i bought years ago by Mark Mothersbaugh (lead singer of Devo). it’s a giant black and white print of a crying cyclops and a girl, fricking amazing and huge. also in the room is my giant cd collection. i have over 500 cds. music used to be my life. since being broke for years, i haven’t been able to afford much, sadly. i had a three cds a week habit for a good while there. oh, those were the days…

arcade machine how-to

steven will be building a home made arcade cabinet for our home and putting it in this room. using an old computer and having it run a MAME, we’ll build a cabinet like we used to see in arcades to play different games on at any given time. again, i’ll be doing artwork for this on the sides, hopefully as bad, cheesy, and wonderful of our 80s memories can give me. we’ve begun looking at new monitor prices (flat panels on the cheap? thank you newegg.com!) and lumber prices to build from scratch.

and for me, i would love to have a glass blown anatomical human heart light as the lighting source in that room. no idea where i could find one and if i could, if i could afford it. heck, i don’t think i’ve even sold steven on the idea yet but i think it’s fricking AWESOME.

off of the middle room/heart of the house is what was described as a 1/2 bath in the listing for the home when we were thinking of buying it. it’s also the laundry room. these two rooms combined don’t give me any problems,  but how ugly it is and how nonfunctional it is gives me PLENTY of problems:

• it was never finished.
• they dropped the ceiling about 7 inches in an already low ceiling room.
• it has 4 different kinds of flooring. none match or even look good.
• it doesn’t have ANY storage whatsoever
• there was water damage on the wall that they never fixed
• they painted over perfectly fine paneling and did a shitty job at painting
• they put a random wall up for no reason and did a bad job at that, not even finishing it
• wires are just hanging out an about, there are holes in the walls. some holes attempting to horribly be patched up
• there is a toilet and a sink in there making it a half bath… but they aren’t even hooked up to anything! just sitting in there!

in an attempt to  make some storage for all the cleaning supplies and hardware supplies and the such that people store in laundry and work rooms, i put up boards i found laying around the house up on the walls above the washer and dryer with brackets from various rooms as well (the previous owners seemed fond of horrible ugly shelving and brackets, or nice ones they painted over ghetto style). those small shelves can only hold so much and honestly aren’t appealing. steven’s grandmother (who lives only half a mile away) is getting her kitchen overhauled with new cabinets and the like. she let me pick through what was being taken out and i got to get a nifty old double cabinet dealy that maybe tonight i will be putting up above the washer and dryer for more storage and more APPEALING storage. i am not that fond of the ghetto “let it all hang out” look of stuff on crappy shelves screwed into horribly painted paneling.

this is just a tide over solution until we can afford to fix up that bathroom. the ideas we have for this room will be cheap to do in the majority, but time consuming. if only money fell from the sky and kept it’s value…

i’ll take some before and after pics of everything just to show you guys!

so now that we have an idea of what colors the house might end up as, what is it next that we are wanting to fix up? well, this was actually first on the list to fix since we want our dogs to have more freedom. a fence!

fencing, it turns out, is crazy expensive. we really wanted nice metal gates, but holy goodness… there is no way we could ever afford to drop that kind of cash. so we looked into loads of different options and man, the majority of those options are just ball sucking lame.

plastic fence? please!  that stuff cracks and breaks like geriatric hip on concrete. vinyl? can you say totally bogus? yeah it’s easy to clean and wipe off but not all that sturdy nor is it’s appearance anything noteworthy. chain link? pah-lease. i may be broke and living on the cheap, but i ain’t that ghetto. there is no way you can make chain link look pretty. anything you can do to pretty it up makes it look even more sad. picket fence? as american as a flat top hair do on a blond dude with a giant gun. we’re so there.

looking at styles, we rather like the look of the french gothic, nice point and shape and the spacing isn’t large enough for our tiny dogs to run out through.

knowing what we want,  we started to attempt to closely find and compare prices. home depot and lowes are the options for pre-made sections and their price difference is a buck, can’t you believe that? also, can you believe that NEITHER ONE has fricking gates? that makes NO sense to me! none! what-so-ever! who wants to fence in a yard and have no option of leaving besides a running jump like a hurdle in the olympics? seriously.

so, we picked the style, figured what is cheaper (lowes is a dollar cheaper and 20 minutes closer), narrowed down the stain options (guess what! it’s grey! fancy that. man, he’s so predictable at times) now how much of the yard do we want to fence off? oh that’s a tricky question there. we can’t afford the footage to fence in the whole she-bang, so we have to be kind of selective of where. seeing as we’re not exactly sure just yet, here is a proposed  sketch of our yard and what i’m thinking:

this is the Der Fraken Haus yard.

• red: estimated yard lines
• white: where the picket fence could possibly lie
• blue line: handmade fencing or wall on the back patio
• thicker lines: gates
• light blue box w/lines: my studio
• blue boxes with x’s: where i might build raised beds.

flower beds inside the yard will be with flowers and foliage. flowerbeds outside the picket fence will be food (so the dogs don’t get into them).

maybe when i get home today i will go out and measure how much we might possibly need and figure out how to  block off the treeline so the dogs don’t get stuck in it (loads of poison oak back there i must kill as well).

more tomorrow on what else we’ll be doing with our measly stimulus check and cross your fingers w can stretch the finds as far as we hope!

if you buy a house this year in the united states, you get 10% back or 8k (which ever is lower) in taxes. since we  bought the house at the very end of feburary, we were just in luck.

when we learned of this amazing awesomeness (thanks to a tip from my friend Cat who sent me  the news articles to prove to the account this in fact was true and going to happen), steel rod and i made it clear that that money was going right back into the house, that way we instantly increase the value of the house the first year we own it by at LEAST 10%.

so where did we want to spend the money on the house? oddly enough, we decided on the outside. we have two small dogs who want to go out and be outside more often, so we decided we wanted fencing… then we ran with it and decided to overhaul as much of the outside as possible.

steven is a bit of an odd fellow.  he’s really surprising when it comes to what he likes in manners of home decor as opposed to what he’s like in personality and personal appearance, not to mention hobbies and lifestyle. the fact the house is actually legally his and i just live with him (and am pretty much his life partner), i outright asked him what he wanted. he said he wanted a grey house. we had that as a start. being a creative person we just bounced ideas off each other until it grew and we had something to work with mentally in our mind.

the end result of our excited conversation about what to make the house look like outside? in steel rod’s words “the addams family country home“.

okay, it'll never look like it, but we can try to get the feel!

yes, my boyfriend loves gothic architecture and look and writing, but not the subculture lifestyle. i know this because the majority of my twenties was spent in and out of goth clubs and such. he likes the aesthetic appeal of the actual literature and time frame of that writing style, but from a point of view of somebody who does something besides sit in a corner, wear black, and whine. so i was floored when he came up with this suggestion. he’ s not a vampire, he’s a vampire hunter.

since we bought a piss yellow ranch house with shit brown trim (in varying shades of piss and shit, as they kept running out of colors and even going so far as to not completely finish the painting the job in the back) with vertical metal siding, there isn’t much we can afford to do but paint it until we can afford the siding we actually do want. steven wants to paint  the main body of the house a shade of light grey. have the trim in a darker grey. black accents all over the place. sadly the house has orange shingles and we wonder if it would be bad to paint those black.

what would be like if we could afford it? our house with horizontal clapboard like appearance. still in varying colors of grey from light to dark with black accents. stone accents on some walls. or maybe grey brick look?

so this weekend we went to Lowes and picked out some colors he likes. the boy is going pretty dark in his color scheme.

these are olmypic paint colors: dover grey, knight’s armor, black magic. i am trying to convince him he should paint the majority of the house dover grey, accent 1 being knight’s armor and accent two being black magic. he wants to totally skip over dover grey.  he’s going straight to the dark stuff. oh, my boyfriend. it’s his house, he can do whatever he wants.

now that paint colors have been picked out, we think we have a painter in mind. we just have to get an estimate and cross our fingers it’s something we can afford with all the other stuff we want to do. so little cash, so much we want done.

here’s to hoping!

so we took some time off for the holiday but it’ll be a few more days before getting a big entry again. tomorrow i have a super scary ultra big giant doctor’s appointment to find out what is exactly wrong with my body not quite working the way a body should.

so man tests to take tomorrow! agh! including boobsmashing and bloodwork and inside pinching… oh my orifices will be probed and new ones made. i want to just curl up in a ball and whimper.

time to put the big girl panties on. the ones with polka dots.

wish me luck!

credit to www.ravensvoyage.com

i’m not your normal girl. i’m pretty sure you’ve figured that out already. my boyfriend isn’t you normal kind of guy either (i mean come on, we call him steel rod!). it’s a pretty nice pairing. both of us live in our own little worlds and both of those worlds are actually quite fantastical.

last night we had to make a trip out to home depot for a super duper el cheapo window ac unit since it would be 110 degrees in our bedroom when it was only 90 outside. whenever we get to a home improvement store, we just wander around literally for a few hours and day dream and “oooo” and “ahhhh!” and so many “oh! we could…!” kind of things. when we do this, if anybody else is in the area they just kind of give us this look like “you want to do WHAT to your place?”

every room in the house, we have a dream theme for. the living room is to eventually look like a world traveling adventurer lived there. one that hunted vampires (steven hates vampires, i love vampire folklore. we have a casket in our living room with both elements in it). his game room is to look like an old west saloon (we’re even looking for the swinging doors!). our master bathroom we want to look like a roman era bath. our bedroom will eventually look like trees are bursting through the walls and birds are nesting in them with jeweled eggs. the half bath and laundry room will be a full bath and laundry room, but done in the style of a 1930s prairie farmhouse. the center room will be an arcade and music room, with murals of comic book characters and a hand built arcade machine.

but the kitchen? the kitchen i want to look like a hybrid of a colonial apothecary and my imagination. oh, how wicked it will be.

i am a pretty decent cook, i wouldn’t say i am amazing. that i claim only for baking. cooking to me is like some science where some of it doesn’t make sense, it’s experimental, and it should make you feel better in the long run. also, my odd fascination with my kitchen having mostly clear glass and metal but yet a still welcoming feel all adds up to “apothecary” in my head.

another view of above shop

i’ve already started picking through yard sales and flea markets and buying what i could afford (a dollar here, 75 cents there, 3 dollars over there) in really nice clear but ornamental shaped glass containers for the kitchen. i love the look of things being collected or on display. i want to be able to see everything and then make beautiful ornate metal tags for them all as if i was doing something witchy that nourished the health of my loved ones. cooking is spell making, seriously.

now, traditional apothecaries are open aired, i want that to an extent. i want cabinet doors, but glass ones. i feel it gives it a more of a finished look. i do want to keep it older looking, though. distressed or roughed up a teensy bit. i don’t like bright shiny and new, i don’t feel that is welcoming to me. i want the perfect combo of home cooked love science ina relaxing enchanting kind of feel.

the color i want the cabinets is Rookwood Sash Green from sherwin williams. it’s the middle ground between green, blue, and grey. i look at that color and i feel like i want to take a deep peaceful breath, roll up my sleeves and get busy with as mile on my face. here is an example of it on a house. it is a historic paint color for the colonies.

eventually i want the horrible pink and green linoleum ripped up from our floor and have a nice walnut hardwoods, or heck! some walnut wood looking flooring. i’m not all that picky and know we’re not rich and can make due with what i’ve given. i also want nickel/pewter pressed tin tiles as backsplash and walnut wood looking counter tops, walnut wood (or walnut stained wood) crown moulding. and if we ever get into the attic space and see it’s not needed and just empty, maybe open up the ceiling so you can see the beams and put some skylights it.

it’s very hard to explain how refined, mystical, delicate, strong, welcoming, scientific, and display like i want the whole thing. i want somebody to go into that kitchen and want to sit down and just look around in wonder but not feel displaced from it all, but like they walked into something awesome.

cause if i don’t feel that way, i doubt i’ll want to ever clean it, be in there to cook, or eat my cereal.

i’ll leave you with inspiration pics, each a link to it’s source.

ps. i noticed nobody ever leaves any comments. that makes me feel sheepish.

Black Walnut Butcher Block Top

Stabler-Leadbeater Apothecary, Alexandria

i am some one who finds high charm in making things out of found objects. because of this fondness, i even like to paint on what other people consider trash.

i love wooden shipping pallets. like, i’m crazy about them. i think they are just amazing and they come in so many crazy shapes and sizes. when i see one, i see a million things i can do with them. it starts some tingling in places, some places it’s not polite to discuss in most company so we’ll leave it at that.

i was pursuing some home decorating site (currently i can’t find, remember, or remember where i found it) a idea of turning a pallet into a plate holder in the kitchen. my mind went crazy with “yes! OTHER PEOPLE are using pallets for things!” and my pallet love grew.

i decided then i wish i had my own set of legal wheels and i would go store to store to turn pallets into household objects (baring Steel Rod wouldn’t complain), but mostly yard objects!

i wanted to turn wooden pallets into a sort of patio wall around our side patio so that once we put a fence up around the yard for the dogs to run around in, then won’t go over the side of the patio and out of the fenced in area. i drew up ideas and was ready to go, but had to wheels to go obtain said little wooden gems… so i kept thinking of what else to turn pallets into; so many things came to mind and one of them was even the fencing! but that would be a lot of pallets as we have a fairly large yard and i don’t know just how readily available pallets are and just how many places would actually let me nab them for cheap.

found @backwoodshome.com/articles2/sawyer69.html

because we bought the house this year, the year our president decided to stimulate our economy in various ways, steven and i are supposed to get a stimulus incentive for purchasing a house in this horrible housing market. we know we need a fence, it is of the utmost importance to use and people with two small dogs and also people who want some semblance of privacy. not to mention, some fencing is just adorable! we were going to use our stimulus check to buy fencing but oh how much it costs is insane. if i can convince steven to have us make fencing out of pallets that are being tossed out and are still in good condition, then not only are we sparing the landfills, but being able to use the cash we will be getting in other much needed ares of the house.

above all, we agreed the money being given to us for buying the house is going right back towards the house.

but i got off on a tangent! back to pallets! i want to make a nice wall around the side patio and that will be so wonderfully easy and cheap and we can stain it to match whatever and then seal it to have it last even longer.

this bad boy says it's for composting but i have other plans!

i called my buddy Sarah Meloncon on saturday while i was attempting to paint the interior of my shed studio in 97 degree heat and failing miserably. telling her of my excitement about my ideas and being a horribly resourceful yet gifted artist with a wicked cool imagination, she reminded me of Instructables website. i gave up on painting in the humidity and heat, went inside and looked up the site to see if they did anything with pallets. i found amazing rosalie porn. pallet ideas at every angle!

this badboy [found at Instructables: here] is supposed to be for composting, i have other plans! i want to make it and make it into something more attractive than just our trash can outside, a nice place to put the trashcan in and sort of “hide” it and making it blend more into the rest of the outside pallet use! even if we don’t make a fence out of pallets, we are looking at wooden fencing anyways and staining it. we’ll just stain it all to match. i can even make one for the lawn mower. Instructables has many tutorials on pallet inspired things including planters i had an idea for before seeing them on the site, but now i can alter other people’s ideas using them as a basis. there are plans for different planters and some furniture there as well on that site.

this beautiful bench was made over Holy Scrap Hot Springs and got my hands itching to replicate it so i can sit under one of my many trees in my yard. i’m totally stealing this idea and putting it in my yard. so cheap to make and so lovely to see!

i can keep going on and on, but my lunch hour is almost up. oh, believe me… this won’t be the end of hearing about my pallet love. a co-worker of mine (hi, Nicole!) said she would love to help in me working on stuff for the house this week due to the fact her cute little daughter is spending time at grandma’s and mom wants to create. thank goodness for friends who want to get their hands dirty and make things beautiful!