A few days ago, I got my sewing machine back from its I-Hope-the-Mississippi-River-Doesn't-Flood vacation at a friend's house, along with our instruments, photos, and other valuable or irreplaceable things. (We live very close to the levee, at a much lower elevation than we previously realized. It was an interesting couple of weeks. You'll be happy to know that the actuary and his family now have flood insurance.) The confluence of my sewing machine's merry return, my finally making time to catch up on favorite parenting and craft blogs for the first time in months, and my rereading of Amanda Soule's Handmade Home have led to a flurry of creative sewing activity in the last week.

I made a family set of reusable sandwich wraps lined with vinyl tablecloth material. Simple squares, two fabrics, fun contrasting thread, zigzag stitching, velcro closures. It took a couple of hours to make four of them, and that includes time to get snacks for my children, arbitrate disputes, change diapers, drink coffee, and start dinner. I was firing on all cylinders. It's totally invigorating. Kent helped by manning the pincushion, which was hilarious. He was very particular about putting the pins back when I handed them to him, and he ended up making my pincushion look sort of like the lunar module.

Detail for those of you who would like to make your own: I cut 14" squares of the outside cotton fabric and 12" squares of the lining fabric, then folded the outside fabric in on itself twice with a 1/2" seam allowance and tucked the lining fabric inside the folds. I zigzag stitched all the way around, then did simple topstitching diagonally across the square to hold the fabrics together. I used the iron-on kind of velcro, which was tricky because I had to get it hot enough to fuse it to the fabric but not so hot that I would melt the vinyl. I failed on the first one, so the first one has a nice little patch on the inside covering the spot where the vinyl melted completely onto the scrap fabric I had thankfully put between the vinyl and my iron. I got the hang of the ironing after that, and I definitely prefer the iron-on kind to the kind you have to pin in place and sew, or the sticky kind that's not really for fabric. Or you could do snaps, but that's less adjustable than velcro if your sandwiches turn out to be different sizes on different days.

A few people have already bought some, which thrills me for a lot of reasons. (1) I'm actually selling something I've made. (2) People are using fewer plastic baggies. (3) I get to keep making more. If you count yourself among the people who might like to own one or more of these, check out my new little Etsy shop. Please email me, leave a comment here, or send me a message through Etsy if there's a different fabric or color combo you'd like to see. I can definitely make custom orders.

Kent is amusing me by falling into the same trap I'm falling into; they are ALL our favorite, and we want to keep all of them. He was very upset when I told him that his best girl friend from school was getting the orange one he had designed, until I told him I could also make one for him and then they could have matching sandwich wraps. He's been so interested in sewing, and the particulars of the machine, that I'm really itching for him to be old enough to learn to sew (and for his feet to reach the floor so he can use the pedal).



This colorful little stack makes me incredibly happy. I am completely re-energized after my long time away from my sewing machine, so glad that our daytime dynamic around here finally allows for some crafting time again.

P.S. I have a new banner. My uncle suggested that many months ago, and I finally got around to it. It looks kind of wonky on the page, but it was fun to make a collage this time. The skill spilled over into making a banner for my Etsy shop as well. Ah, Photoshop. Your many mysteries will slowly be revealed to me. Someday.

Labels: craftiness, Kent, photography

• posted by erica 7/15/2011 10:19:00 PM
•  3 comments

I got some great tartlet pans last year for Christmas, and I kept thinking that when spring and summer fruit season rolled around, I'd be all over making fruit tartlets. I finally got around to it this morning, totally on a whim, since I noticed a confluence of fresh strawberries, peaches, and blueberries in my house.

I still remember the first time I saw a fruit tartlet, at a bakery in France. Bright, beautiful sliced fruit, under a shiny orange glaze, tucked into a perfect little circular pastry. I thought it was magical. I've had some that also have a thin layer of vanilla pastry cream under the fruit, and those are amazingly good, but I thought that for my first attempt, I'd try one that had just fruit and glaze.

I found this recipe and quartered it, because I didn't want to have fruit tartlets for the next week, but I noticed that the shells can be frozen, so next time, I may make a whole batch of shells and then freeze most of them. The pastry got just a tad bit overcooked in the 15 minutes it was in the oven, so next time I'll probably check it after about 13. Also, the glaze was very thick. Like, bordering on Jell-O thick. I'll definitely try less cornstarch next time. I thinned it out considerably with some water after it had cooled, but it still went on very gloppily, as you can see in the closeup photo. It tasted wonderful, though. The whole thing was delicious. I made one for Kent with just strawberries, thinking he would prefer that to one with fruits he didn't like, but he still looked at it skeptically and refused to try it, so Jack and I just ate all of them. One for each of us for second breakfast, one for each of us for dessert after dinner. Perfectly delightful.

My mom is in France this week, and I find myself wanting to make all kinds of foods that remind me of France. This was super fun to try, and it'll be even more fun if I can just pull a few shells out of the freezer and make a few of these when the mood strikes and the fruit is in season.

Labels: kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 7/04/2011 08:58:00 PM
•  3 comments

Tonight's dinner was, I think, my favorite kind. It was brought to us largely from our garden. Green beans from the garden. Couscous with zucchini and basil from the garden, plus chick peas and feta. Homemade crusty wheat bread with basil butter (again, basil from the garden). This is how I want to eat all the time. Good protein, clean flavor, herbs, freshness, and stuff I grew or made myself. I'd need about three times the garden space I currently have, or more, if we were going to make a real go of growing most of our own vegetables... and wouldn't it rock to have some blueberry bushes like Jack's parents have, and/or a couple of citrus trees? I'm dying for more space to grow greens, and I want to try winter squash this year after some of the summer stuff is out of the way. Lumber and dirt would cost a lot upfront to make a super-expanded garden, not to mention the carpentry hours to build more raised beds. At least my husband does carpentry for free. Sometimes I feel like I'm always planning the next season. Though I love the sprouts and flowers and vegetables I'm seeing, I'm always itching for the chance to try new things the next time.

Anyway, this is all to say that I really enjoy deliberate growing and cooking when they're this closely tied together. I enjoy growing for its own sake, and cooking for its own sake, but it reaches a wonderful new level when they're intertwined, when I've planted the seeds and nurtured the plants that sprouted the vegetables we're enjoying for dinner. I'd imagine it would feel much the same way to raise a calf, then make butter or cheese from her milk. Don't worry. I'm not looking into livestock just yet. However, I know too many chicken people, and they have definitely tempted me with the promise of quirky pets and fresh eggs. (Z and Lauren, meet Jon and Emily.) I already have names picked out for our someday chickens...

Also, can I just say how amazing it is to watch my children take up this cause of mine? Kent is a wonderful helper, going on green bean treasure hunts with me, and turning on the sprinkler, and getting so excited about the growth of vegetables and herbs even though he cares nothing for eating them. This summer's corn crop will be a little present from me to him, since our carrots fizzled out last year, and corn on the cob and raw carrots are basically the only vegetables he enjoys. I want to reward his hard work and excitement with something he really loves eating. Dean is too young to harvest much, but is an avid leaf grabber, and he eats herbs straight from the garden. He'll just walk around the back yard with a sage leaf in his mouth. He also loves my cooking, at least for now. Today, when I harvested our very first okra pod and then sliced and fried it, he got his first taste of that amazing snacky thing and couldn't get enough. And I noticed that our watermelon plants have three teeny-tiny bumps already, so all of us shall watch those grow with much anticipation of the sticky summer days to come.

Even though Kent doesn't do the eating part of our vegetables, he still loves to help in the kitchen, so today I gave him my old job from when I was a kid: snapping the beans. I showed him how to snap them in half so the two halves are almost the same size, because his first few were about 1/5 and 4/5. He was so darn proud of himself once he got the hang of it. It reminded me so much (and I told him this) of the day not so many years ago when he sat with my grandmother in her living room and watched her snap beans.


This afternoon (don't you love his determined expression?)


Kent and my Granny, September 2008

So I'm calling this whole thing Lifestyle Gardening. Gardening for the kind of life you want to have. Last week, we picked and immediately took some green beans to our very good friends who live about ten minutes away, just because we were thinking of them and wanted to bring them some of our harvest. And I had so many green beans yesterday that I shared some with our neighbor, and she returned with a finished dish about an hour later for me to sample. I barely know her, but my garden brought us together. That's just awesome. Flowers are beautiful, but I feel like I have to concentrate my efforts. I want to grow things that mean something and that nourish my family, and that I can share to nourish other people. So each year, I ask my husband for a new raised bed, and I continue the dreaming that, over time, works its way into magic on my plate.

Labels: flora, kitchen adventures, photography

• posted by erica 5/17/2011 09:56:00 PM
•  5 comments

Here's Dean's big news of the day.



And now, the back story.

Last Thursday, Kent and Dean were both at the top of our slide in the back yard. Kent had mentioned that he wanted to slide down with Dean on his lap, something I've helped them do in the past, but I told him he just needed to wait his turn this time. Kent was mad at me for that, and then he got frustrated that Dean wasn't sliding down right away, so he started to nudge him. I was sitting several feet away, watching what was happening, and I called out to Kent not to push Dean because he might fall. Kent looked right at me, nudged Dean again, and Dean lost his balance, toppled over the side of the slide, and fell flat on the ground below.

Maybe the back story should start earlier. 15 months ago, Kent got a baby brother. He didn't know what to do with him, or with us when we weren't paying attention to him. When Dean started to sit up, Kent started getting aggressive, pushing him over, hitting him on the head with things... he never seems to want to hurt Dean, at least not in a "I hate this baby" kind of way, but maybe in a "I want Mom and Dad to notice me" kind of way. He's had a lot of trouble controlling his impulses to hurt him. A lot of trouble. My reactions probably don't help, because I'm really inconsistent: some days, I can handle it calmly and try to give Kent the benefit of the doubt and teach him, whereas other days, I totally lose it and scream at him because I'm just so sick of him hurting his brother. I went through a period of several months when I felt like I couldn't even leave the two of them alone together, because if I even went to the bathroom while Kent was watching TV and Dean was in the room with him, Dean would suddenly be on his back crying and Kent would be telling me very calmly that he had just pushed Dean over. If last Thursday had been the first, or one of only a few, times that Kent had hurt Dean, I'm sure I would have handled it differently, but after I watched Dean fall three feet to the ground, I immediately leapt up and screamed at Kent to get in the house while I scooped up Dean and tried to figure out what might have happened to him or what he fell on (his head, his back, his arm... it was all a blur).

I worried first that he might have a concussion, but he didn't have any of the traditional symptoms and woke up about every hour that night, so I stopped worrying about that pretty quickly. The next morning, while I was in a near stupor from lack of sleep, Jack noticed that Dean was very reluctant to use his right arm, not wanting to put any weight on it when he was sitting, even though he was still using his hand to grab things. I was flying to North Carolina that morning for a wedding on Saturday, so in the twenty minutes before I was going to leave for the airport, I was trying to figure out whether I should even go, or whether I just needed to skip the whole trip and take Dean to the doctor. Jack tried to reassure me that Dean's injury didn't seem too bad, and that I could take him to the ER once I got to North Carolina if he still seemed to need it, so I got on the plane with Dean. Jack and Kent were staying home for the weekend, and I was honestly relieved to have some time away from Kent so that I could cool down and get some perspective on him.

Dean and I had our merry little jaunt to Winston-Salem for my cousin Beth's wedding, and the trip would have been marvelous if Dean hadn't been so fussy and sad. I thought it was mostly the travel and all the new people, though I kept thinking something must be wrong with his joints or something. I thought if he had a broken bone, it would have been much more obvious, so that couldn't have been it. He was also feverish on Saturday and Sunday, so I was giving him Tylenol and praying he wasn't getting yet another ear infection.

Babies and pre-verbal toddlers are such a mystery, really. There's so much I know about Dean, so much I can tell from his moods, gestures, signs, and syllables, but there's so much I don't know that I'm really yearning to find out. I felt like I was getting to know Kent in a totally different way when his language exploded and he was suddenly labeling everything, and I want that with Dean. It would have been particularly helpful this weekend, but that's not who he is yet, so we deal with who he is in this moment.

Dean and I got home late Sunday night, and his fever seemed much better. I stopped giving him Tylenol. I was still wondering about his arm, but I wanted to wait another day to get acclimated to being back home. Monday and Tuesday passed with him acting okay, but not great. He didn't want to use that arm very much, but again, I was mostly thinking that he'd be in a lot more pain, and I'd be able to see something obviously wrong with his body, if it were broken. This morning, though, he was very upset and was pulling at his ears a lot, so I figured if I was going to take him to the doctor, I might as well do it today and get his ears and arm looked at all at once.

Our appointment was at 11:30, right after I picked up Kent from school, so I had brought some granola bars with us because I figured lunch would be a while away. The doctor confirmed that both ears were infected, then sent us to radiology to have Dean's arm x-rayed. Kent and I watched through the glass as a stranger-averse and screaming Dean got x-rays, with one tech holding him while another took the pictures. I explained to Kent what was happening, and his curiosity about the whole thing was satisfied when they were able to show him one of the pictures on their computer. He's very into skeletons, so he thought it was interesting. Dean also needed to have blood drawn to check his hemoglobin, which I would have done at his 15-month checkup last week except that I needed to leave to pick up Kent and figured I'd just come back another day. So as long as I was in that part of the clinic, I just had them do his bloodwork, too. On the other arm, of course. Kent sat quietly on a little stool while they stuck a needle in (yes, screaming) Dean's arm to get a blood sample. Then we headed back to the ped's office to await the radiology results and talk to our doctor about the next step. She was at a meeting, but she and the nurse texted back and forth for a few minutes (I think it's funny that even doctors pull out their phones to text during a meeting), and in the meantime the nurse told me that Dean did have a fractured radius and ulna (the two bones of the forearm) and would need to see an orthopedist.

After the doctor came back, I asked if I could talk to her without Kent in the room, so she had one of her nurses ask him to come play with her. I spilled my guts about how frustrated and upset I've been about Kent's aggression toward Dean, how it seems almost constant, and how broken bones take it to a whole new level in my mind. Of course, Kent didn't actually break Dean's bones, but he was careless and refusing to listen to my warnings, and because of that, something really serious happened to Dean. It terrifies me that Dean could have just as easily gotten a brain or spinal injury if he had fallen in a different way. So our doctor (who I'm coming to love more and more) had a stern talk with Kent about how he needs to treat Dean, how someday they're going to run around together and have a wonderful time, but that Dean is so much smaller than Kent right now that Kent really needs to be careful with him. All the months of Jack and me telling him this have not stuck, obviously, so I'm desperately hoping that an authority figure might drive the point home, or that he'll just age out of it. Soon.

When we saw the doctor again, it was after 1:00, and I knew I needed some food and some co-parenting assistance, so I called Jack and told him he needed to leave work and meet us there. He took Dean home to wait for our appointment time at the orthopedic clinic, and Kent and I went to find some lunch. It was the first time in a week that I had been alone with Kent, and I really wanted to feel like I was connecting with him. He clams up any time I ask about school (totally age-appropriate), so attempts to discuss school fell flat, but I asked him about what our doctor had said to him and asked how he felt. He reiterated what she said to him, but I'm still not sure how much is sinking in. Sigh. Anyway, we enjoyed a lot of good pizza and happened to see a preview for Cars 2, which we didn't even know about, so it was a fairly light few moments in the middle of a crazy day.

Kent announced that all that pizza was making him feel tired, so I thought there was a good chance he'd want to take a nap, Jack would stay home with him, and I'd be taking Dean to ortho alone. I had posted quickly on Facebook about what was happening, and my friend Jennifer responded that she'd be glad to help if I wanted to call her, so I called her almost the moment that Kent fell asleep and asked if she'd be able to meet me at the clinic at 3 just so I'd have someone there with me. I opened the conversation by saying, "So you remember a few minutes ago when you said I should call you if I needed anything?" and she said jokingly, "Boy, you just jumped right on that one, didn't you?"

Jennifer earned the Most Dedicated Friend award today.

I got home with an asleep Kent, just in time to swap children with my husband and take Dean to get his cast. Jennifer met us at the clinic, and between filling out paperwork, paying our copay, and waiting back in the doctor's waiting area, it was an hour before we saw the orthopedist. Our pediatrician had said she wasn't sure if they'd need to do any anesthesia on Dean, so we shouldn't feed him anything just to be on the safe side, but this is a kid who eats a meal or snack about every two hours, often nursing in between, so going several hours without eating or nursing was starting to wear on him (besides the obvious physical discomfort he had already been in for several days). I paced around the office, holding him and singing to him to keep him happy, for probably 30 minutes, while everyone who had gotten there before us went back for their consultations on various broken bones. Nobody else had a screaming child.

[Are you tired yet?]

Once we saw the orthopedist, things went very quickly, and Jennifer helped carry our stuff and asked a couple of questions here and there that I hadn't thought to ask. The ortho doctor showed me the breaks on Dean's x-ray, talked to me about the cast and how we'd need to follow up with him, and then sent me straight to a nurse who'd do the cast. He was great, as was his entire staff. The nurse who put on Dean's cast was so empathetic to him, and another nurse came in to help hold his arm. They offered him a lollipop, which I was more than happy to give him even though I'd never given him one before, so he ate the lollipop, cried in between licks, and thereby drooled green sticky goop on himself and me. I also got cast goop dripped on my arm, which I'm pretty sure is going to stay there until that skin eventually sloughs off. I was in great shape by this point, let me tell you. But it was almost over (it only took about ten minutes for her to put the cast on him), and I knew he could nurse as soon as she were done and then we could get back to our lives.

So yes, they finished his cast, Jennifer sat with me and chatted about all kinds of funny things while Dean nursed, and then we did return to our lives. And I'm just going to say right now that Dean is a superstar. He is powering through everything, delighting in banging his cast on the table at dinner and already figuring out how to transfer food from his right hand to his left to get it into his mouth.



Did you notice that the cast matches his eyes? That was no accident. A mom has to focus on something like that to get through the day.

I have no idea how he'll sleep with this thing on his arm — my guess is badly — but he seems so much happier in general that we all finally clued in to what was wrong with him. He seems to actually like his cast, or at least he's relieved that his arm doesn't hurt any more. We also have antibiotics to fight his ear infection (#6, for those keeping score at home), so he's well on the way to recovery.

I am trying SO. HARD. Not to stay mad at Kent. I know things like this happen with siblings, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to figure out how to teach Kent to do better. I don't want every step of this cast episode to turn into a guilt trip. He didn't hurt him on purpose. But he did hurt him. Anyway, I hope we'll get through this with Kent having learned something. Or maybe it'll be like Danny Kaye's character in White Christmas, where Dean will just have to grab his arm and wince every time he wants something from Kent.

Labels: Dean, Kent, photography, under the weather

• posted by erica 5/11/2011 09:02:00 PM
•  8 comments

I've been thinking this week about how my mom and Bill are going to France this summer, and I'm a little jealous but mostly just excited for them. So that means I've also been thinking about French food. A lot. African hot chocolate at Angelina in Paris. Tarte au poisson and Kir Royal at a bistro in Rouen. Crepes from a street vendor in the Jardin des Tuileries. Croque monsieur sandwiches, pretty much anywhere. On this rainy day, in which I was sorely disappointed not to go to the Rex parade in NOLA and desperately needed something to help me embrace the rain, I couldn't get savory crepes out of my head. Crepes made with salt and herbs instead of sugar and vanilla, wrapped around roasted chicken, mushrooms, and potatoes, and topped with just a smidge of gravy. La Madeleine has something like this on their menu, but it's overly salty and has too much gravy, so I decided I could do better myself.

I can roast a pretty great chicken, but this seemed to need the ease of a rotisserie chicken. Rotisserie chickens remind me of France, too; the apartment I stayed in in Nice was right next to an open market, and I walked past the rotisserie chickens every morning on my way to school. Even at 8 a.m., it's a great smell. Plus, there's that lovely scene from Amélie where she's describing everything to a blind man at breakneck pace, including a child who's watching a dog who's watching some chickens spin on a rotisserie.

The chicken already taken care of, I diced some potatoes and onions, quartered some mushrooms, and threw the vegetables into a roasting dish with olive oil, salt and pepper, and herbes de Provence. They did their thing in a 425 degree oven while we watched Jeopardy! (it comes on at 4:30 here, freakishly), and then I made the gravy and crepes. For the crepes, I used Alton Brown's recipe and followed the "savory" guidelines, using fresh parsley from my garden for the herbs. The gravy had to be vegetarian, because Jack was having the same thing I was having, minus the chicken, so I made a roux and then added a cup of vegetable broth, some dried thyme, and some fresh parsley. I simmered it until it was thick, while I was cooking the crepes, then rolled everything together like a big French enchilada and spooned some gravy on top. Et voilà. It was done.

I had meant to steam some broccoli with it (since the green beans at the store looked horrible) but about five minutes before everything else was done, I realized I had forgotten the broccoli. It would have been nice to have a fresh vegetable, but we did just fine. And I realized that even buying a whole chicken, I fed all of us for less than I would've spent on the thing from La Madeleine.

One bite into it, I knew it was better than La Madeleine's, anyway.

Best rainy day meal I've had in quite some time.

Labels: eating out, kitchen adventures, photography, travel

• posted by erica 3/08/2011 07:26:00 PM
•  3 comments

The hardest part of our bathroom remodel is finding a chance to work. Two small children tend to need our attention, like ALL THE TIME. Go figure. So after a couple of months of biding our time on the bathroom repair, Jack had scraped away at the popcorn ceiling little by little, and he and his dad had pulled out our fake marble shower walls. Then Jack took out the drywall around the tub this past week, but with as much as we still had left, it felt like it was painfully slow to get things rolling. We finally caught our big break on Friday afternoon. A friend volunteered to watch Dean for a couple of hours, so I called Jack at work and told him to come home early. We put Kent in front of a movie (Wall-E, which we all love), and then we launched into our long-awaited demolition.

I had pulled up some of the baseboards and quarter-round a few weeks ago, very satisfying at first, until I realized there was a second layer of flooring underneath the linoleum that was standing in the way of the baseboards coming out completely. So we had this big plan to yank up the flooring and get the tub out all at once, whenever we both had a chance to get in there and work. The first layer of floor came up fairly easily in large pieces. Then Jack started in on the second layer, which came up in one big piece and revealed — yep — a third layer. Jack remarked that it was one layer for each decade the house has existed. Actuaries think of things like that. So this bottom layer was linoleum that was basically stuck right on the slab. It peeled off in unruly chunks, kind of like one of those bad price stickers that doesn't come all the way off, but 37 square feet of that. It'll require a lot of scraping to take care of it and reveal the nice clean slab underneath. Honestly, it makes me just want to coat the whole floor in Goo Gone. Bleh. At least the baseboards came out really easily after all the flooring was gone, and we can chip away at the residue in the coming days.


The first major item to leave the house was our old toilet. Thank goodness our city does large-item pickup every week.


Here's the floor after we took out the toilet and part of the top layer of flooring, and you can see the second layer of flooring where we started to take up the floor next to the tub.


The third layer of flooring, some very crusty, yellowish old linoleum.


See my pretty chunks of baseboard? P.S. The mask is for mold, not fashion or comfort.


The awesome do-it-yourselfers.

The second major undertaking of the day, removing the tub, required a sledgehammer. As we've learned about bathroom remodeling, we've realized that almost everyone busts up their tub with a sledgehammer to get it out, because they're so darn heavy that it's nearly impossible to get them out in one piece. We already called the Habitat Restore to see if they wanted to come pick it up, but after they told us they don't have a lot of demand for cast-iron tubs, we figured there was no reason to try to get it out in one piece. After the flooring was out of the way, Jack was free to start whacking away at the tub. Observe.





It took a while, and Jack was tentative at first but really got into a groove and would shout triumphantly every so often when a big piece came flying off. Kent was very concerned about the banging, though not enough to stop watching Wall-E. Jack managed to break the tub into two large, ridiculously heavy pieces that he and I carried awkwardly out to the curb, plus several medium-sized chunks and about 100,000 tiny shards, one of which later took up residence in my foot before we had a chance to sweep thoroughly. Better me than my kids, I guess.


This is what remained after we carried out the first big chunk of tub. Note the small tear visible in the drywall just above the tub.


Here's our bathtub alcove after all the pieces were removed, but before sweeping.


And here's that same space after sweeping. Stark contrast.

Did you notice the tear in the drywall? That came from a flying piece of metal. Here's what it looks like on the other side, which happens to be in our guest bathroom:

Oh well. Patching comes with the territory. And we're probably going to be replacing the flooring in this bathroom (boy, I hope it has the same three layers) and repainting it when we're done with the other bathroom, so we'll hardly notice the extra work. Ha.


Kent is very happy to walk around the bathroom again and see the changes unfolding.

On their way to us from various corners of the internet are a new, deeper bathtub and all our shower/tub hardware. Amazon really does sell just about everything these days. We've also been all over town for research and price comparisons, to tile and plumbing stores, hardware stores, and paint stores. (Painting still seems somewhere in the distant future, considering all the other work that needs to be done first.) We have this saying in our house every time we start a project, no matter how small: "There's never just one trip to Lowe's." This time, though, it's getting out of hand. They're going to start recognizing us soon. "Oh, there's the mom with the screeching baby who always carries around the same tile mosaic to different parts of the store to match it to everything..."

Labels: husband things, Kent, photography, The Great Bathroom Project of 2011, video

• posted by erica 2/26/2011 05:14:00 PM
•  5 comments

Part of what's been keeping me away from my blog lately is a bathroom, er, situation we seem to have found ourselves in. We first started noticing a small spot of mold near our shower in the master bath a few weeks ago, and the shower wall had started to pull away from the drywall. It seemed like just another thing we'd have to take care of whenever we eventually sell our house, and Jack and I began to think about eventually redoing the bathroom. Eventually.

But then we started wondering how big of a problem we were dealing with. We noticed what seemed like a leak in our shower behind the wall, making the drywall puffy. It started to seem like more of a "fix this now" problem. We asked advice from Jack's dad, who suggested we call our insurance company in case the mold problem warranted an insurance claim.

Cut to now... about half a dozen people have been in and out of our house in the last two weeks. First, we had a visit from a mold abatement subcontractor, who left a dehumidifier in our bathroom for three days and sprayed anti-microbial stuff to stop mold growth. We had a plumber come cut a hole in the wall and fix the shower leak, which we learned was due to hairline crack in a cheap plastic pipe. (I'm just going to point out right now that the metal replacement pipe cost $6.50, which means this entire problem arose because of a decision some cheap person made before we ever owned the house to save a few dollars. Keep this in mind as you read, and as this story unfolds over the coming months.)

Our insurance adjuster has also been here, and today, a contractor came to rip out the wall and find out exactly how much mold was back there. The drywall was pretty disgusting, as you can see.





The drywall is gone now, and according to our insurance adjuster, it would be less than our $1000 deductible to replace the drywall and glue the shower wall back to it. But in a particularly rocking visit to Lowe's last week, Jack and I thought, "Hey, why stop there?" We've never really liked this bathroom, but it has a ton of potential. A little sugar and caffeine prompted me to suggest that we turn this into a mostly-do-it-ourselves awesome remodeling project. So now we're pricing deeper tubs, wall tile, floor tile, toilets, fixtures, and storage. We have great plans. Great plans, I tell you. I can't really sketch this sort of thing like a designer would, and it's still a fluid vision in my head anyway, but I envision neutral beiges and grays on the walls and floors with hints of color, a big white soaking tub, possibly some glass tile in the shower, a dark piece of wood furniture for storage at the opposite end of the bathroom, a mirror to open up the space, and maybe a dual flush toilet. Oh, and before anything else, we're getting rid of the popcorn ceiling. We always told ourselves we'd do that someday, going room to room at our own pace, so this is as good a time as any to start that.

Mostly I'm eager to get it underway, but since we have a second bathroom and are waiting on a tax refund, there's no big rush. This will give us time to do the research we need to do, and acquire the many skills we need to acquire, which we currently do not have. But these are skills we need, and I know we can do it. I just have no idea how long it's going to take, since we also happen to be parents of two very active tiny persons.

My goal is to get this done by my birthday. We shall see.

Labels: photography, The Great Bathroom Project of 2011

• posted by erica 1/24/2011 04:54:00 PM
•  6 comments