Last year, my mom bought me 2 sets of 1,000 thread count sheets from Smart Bargains. I love these sheets so much. So cool and soft and thick and smooth and wonderful. I’ve looked since then, but haven’t found any more for a good price. Today, though, they were having a 25% off sale!
I picked up a set of 1,500 thread count (!) blue sheets:
Some 1,000 tc red sheets:
And a matching red duvet cover. All three items shipped to me for under $250. I’m very excited about this! Two sets of sheets is not enough. I’ve had a few evenings where one set is dirtied by a dog’s muddy paws and the other set is wet in the wash or sitting in the laundry basket. Now, I will have four luxurious options and two duvet covers in case the same problem happens with paws on the top layer.
If you want to take advantage of this goodness, go through this link - you can get free shipping and an extra 15% off (I don’t get anything for this - I’m just sharing the love).
One year ago today, I bought this house! The house and I are very happy together, and we have made so much progress in the last year. We celebrated with cupcakes from Cakelove (an important feature of my neighborhood), presents, and quality time.
First, I spent about 5 hours cleaning this morning and I also finally finished painting that hole I patched in the bedroom like 2 months ago. It was quite a mess over here. I don’t know how neat freaks live with dogs. The fur everywhere drives me crazy, but I am not motivated enough to make myself vacuum every day. Plus the dust! It’s always desperately time to clean each weekend, and by this morning the tumbleweeds of fur were rolling around everywhere.
As for presents - since moving a painting from my bedroom to the basement, I’ve had an open spot that bothers me every day. Today, I stopped by Pier1 and found this pillar candle holder which goes very well with the votive holders by the bed and the sparkly red theme.
The dormers on the front of my house provide two “secret rooms” for storage. One is in the corner of my bedroom and the other runs from my bedroom, over the entry way, into the office.They have these retro looking doors on them.
Inside these secret rooms is attic space, with a floor. The doors are insulated.
This insulation drives me crazy! It always sheds bits when I open the secret rooms, and when I close them back up it gets stuck and sticks out of the door a bit. Since before I moved in here, I’d planned to loosely cover the insulation with plastic to prevent this from happening. It’s a 5 minute job. Yet here we are, nearly a year into my ownership of this house, and still the insulation.
Today, as I put away the christmas boxes, I finally grabbed some bags and the staple gun and took care of this.
How gratifying to cross off one of the oldest items on my todo list!
Most of those annoying projects I mentioned a week or two ago are still hanging around. Work seems to get in the way of working on the house. However, I did get one finished. In the bedroom was an outlet that was loose in the wall. It had been screwed in to the plaster instead of into the box that’s attached to the stud. This meant I’d have to hold the outlet every time I unplugged something to make sure the outlet didn’t yank on the old fabric wires. So I took the 3 minutes and 5 trips up and down from the 2nd floor to the basement to get the right screwdrivers and screws, and now that’s fixed.
Only about 1,879 more of these little projects to go.
Does everyone have these little projects in their house that won’t take all that long to fix, but once you do fix them you realize just how annoying that problem was and how glad you are that it’s taken care of? I have lots of those around the house. This weekend, I’m going to try to address a bunch of them. So far, the list includes fixing all those places I got paint on the ceiling when I painted every wall of this house, patching up a bunch of little holes, and fixing a loose outlet. I’ve already started on one.
In my bedroom, there was this coaxial cable sticking out of the wall. it was the female end, just like you’d plug into a TV. They simply drilled a hole for it in the wall and ran it through. Of course, it doesn’t connect to anything. It just stuck out annoying me. Here’s a glimpse cropped from a previous picture of the bedroom.
I’ve finally cut it off, pushed the wire back through the wall, and patched the hole. Now I just need to sand and paint it and that little problem will be history.
I don’t know if that will happen today, though. I stayed up until 4am to finish reading The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. I finished it’s almost 600 pages in 3 days. Everyone should buy it and read it, especially the dog people among us. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. It was worth staying up for, but I think I’ll need a nap.
I’ve held off on buying furniture for most of the house because I wanted to get good stuff which means expensive stuff. However, I really liked this Hemnes collection from IKEA. I’ve had the dresser for a while and finally I broke down and bought the bed and end tables. I really like them, and it looks great now that I’ve put up curtains, the new Dog picture and some candle holders. The only thing left is to get a red chair for the corner with the floor lamp, and maybe a few more things for that wall.
IKEA furniture is much easier to put together with power tools. I put one of the wrenches in my vice and broke it off to use in my drill (since my allen wrench bits were in the office). What a relief to do that instead of spending all afternoon screwing things in by hand.
It is 3am as I write this blog post. I went to bed at about 2 (usual time for me), ready to enjoy my fan. I laid down, turned off the lights, and then heard a noise. It sounded kind of like drumming fingernails in the attic. Mind you, I have a cape cod, so the attic is a really tiny space, inaccessible from the house. It’s not like I could go up there (nor could a crazed attacker).
“DAMN!” I yelled, startling the dogs. I figured something must have gotten up there somehow, maybe through the siding or some bizarre thing. Just what I need - large invading creatures. It was a significant noise. Not tiny mouse scrape scrapes. There were some scrapes, but loud ones, and also this drumming sound, like a person tapping her fingernails on my ceiling.
I dragged myself out of bed, got dressed, and listened. It was there. Now there are a LOT of sounds in this house at night, and I have never heard a single thing before up there in the attic. My theory was that maybe having the fan on was vibrating something up there that was in turn disturbing the creatures (or ghost). I got my flashlight and went into the secret rooms under the roof that I can access from the dormers. I can’t see into the top-of-the-roof attic part from there, but I thought perhaps there would be some evidence of something. There was nothing. The worst thing I saw was a tiny spiderweb.
While I was doing this, I had turned off the fan. There was not a single sound from the attic. I banged on my ceiling hoping to disturb the creature (or ghost). Still nothing. I turned the fan back on and it started right back up, over by my closet. I stood there, head close to the ceiling. Suddenly, the sound seemed to move and get very loud. And then it showed itself to me. It was creatures - 7 of them:
It was the dog painting. It is hung with a wire on a nail, but wasn’t quite flush against the wall. Plus, the fan was on reverse (earlier today I must have accidentally hit the wrong button on the remote). This was pulling the air up toward the ceiling, pushing it out toward the walls, and down behind the painting making it move back and forth. It would kind of vibrate, making the drumming sound against the wall. I took down the painting, and the sound stopped.
Mystery solved.
An hour of my life for that (plus 15 minutes to blog it because I have to tell SOMEONE). It’s a good thing Cabinet Guy is always late; I’d hate to have to drag myself out of bed before 9am to be ready if I actually expected him on time.
Our Killer Heat Wave of last weekend has passed, but it is still way up in the 80s here in the Nation’s Capital. That makes for a warm house, especially when I’m trying to sleep. While I love AC and admit I will be running it a lot this summer, my eco-friendly side is resisting it until absolutely necessary (like last weekend when it was 100 degrees and mom and I ran 6.5 miles).
I decided to reconnect my ceiling fan. I had a bit of a panic when I discovered the fabric covered wires that were attached to the old light switch in my bedroom. That switch wasn’t doing much, since I wasn’t using the fan and the light uses a really weird bulb that had died. Plus, the fan only goes on via remote control and neither my realtor nor inspector could get that to work. So, to make myself feel better, I disconnected one wire from the switch (it was late, and I actually did this with the power ON without thinking, which lead to a big old sparkly pop), put a wire nut on it, and vowed never to look at those fabric wires again.
But now, the giant nice ceiling fan can probably do some good. I safely reconnected it, repaired the remote by rotating the battery, and viola! Working fan! It does help quite a bit, and I anticipate a much more comfortable evening tonight, even if it is very humid and the temp doesn’t drop below 70. Yeah. I’m a fan of the fan.
I don’t really like ceiling fans, even very nice ones. We’ll see how this works functionally once it gets warmer. If it is not doing much to keep life cool, I’m going to replace it.
I think this light is beautiful and would be perfect. Note how it mimics the red star thing in my window. It’s 18″ X 18″, so it would have good presence in the room.
I took a razor to the corner of my wall to investigate the potential wallpaper. Here’s what I found.
First, be amazed at how much this looks like a map with a big continent from a distance…
I decided to peel this up over a seam and on a crack. The seam doesn’t show up too well, but you can tell when the paper switches from greyish to browninsh. Here is a closeup where I have labeled all the parts.
This bit is in the dormer, so it’s not plaster. It’s not sheetrock either. It’s some weird white board with little thread looking things in it (I investigated from the attic side). I did check one tiny spot on the plaster wall, and the layers are all the same.
So the blue paint came off in its own layer, and the beige did too. Then there was this bright bright yellow. That was on top of the brown papery stuff. Could that be yellow wallpaper? It seemed to flake away and I am not familiar with wallpaper that’s brown on the back - all of it that I’ve seen in my life has been a thinish white backed thing. The brown paper also flaked off pretty easily. Then I was left with the basic white board.
After all this destruction, Ruth sent me pictures of her paneling, and they look just like this. So I guess it’s not wallpaper after all. Now I just have to patch up these holes
