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!

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!

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!

this building is being turned into my painting and art studio! (this was done before we finalized buying the house in february.)

because it was on the far corner of the property (on the side we actually have a neighbor) and facing away, we had it moved behind the house to another cement slab that was left behind and actually facing towards the house. this was done this past weekend by an amazing old friend i know from my theater days, Greg Carswell. because of many health problems, he wasn’t able to do it sooner but eventually said “you know, i don’t have to get off the tractor!” so he just drove his big old tractor from his farm over to our yard, and with the help of strapping young lad by the name of Alex, they moved my shed for me! not only that, but while he waited for me to make sure nothing inside the shed would break while he moved it, he mowed my lawn. bad.ass.

here is the view from the spot the building was moved to, you can see how far it had to travel. (this was done before we finalized buying the house in february.)

steel rod’s dad knows a good number of people, some of whom are electricians. being one who wants to help out and make the home a better place for his son to live, my not-quite-my-dad-in-law broke the news to me on sunday that he is going to come over and dig in the yard, bury me a line, connect my studio to power, put in some outlets, and even hang up some lighting! go, not-quite-my-dad-in-law! how awesome is that? i can be painting as early as the fourth of july!

i have to go in and paint the inside and a friend of mine gave me two giant boxes of tile she’s not going to use. at first i thought i would tile the floor with that, but now i’m thinking “if it’s going to be MY studio, why don’t i go whole hog?” so i am going to go on freecycle and ask for any and all tile, broken and not and maybe even mirror pieces and make my floor a tiles mosaic! no set pattern or picture, just loads of broken tile and maybe broken plates….. ooo i keep getting ideas. i think that could be beautiful since everything else will be primed white as to not interfere with me seeing paint colors for what they are when i’m working.

off of freecycle i got some windows and i want to put them into the side of the shed to get some natural lighting but am unsure of how to go about that and not mess up the shed. honestly, though… natural lighting just makes all that much more differance when painting and just feeling good about life. hrm. maybe i can find somebody to help me with that one. i did borrow a jigsaw from somebody!

i’m so excited. i may live in a shithole, but it’s our shithole and we’re very very very slowly but surely making it nonshitholey. and now i have my own painting and art studio! holy crap!

don’t EVER let anybody tell you that money gets in the way of things. if everybody pitches in and helps each other out, everything works out for everyone. i am so proud of the way my life has turned out and who it’s led me to.

and i got an art studio. HA HA HA.

pics of the haul!