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.

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.

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!