December 28, 2007

To any reader who might happen to encounter this particular entry in my blog: I suggest you go to the Gallery on this web site, click on the album identified “Vicki,” and then on the album identified “My Home 12 28 07.” I’m hoping the captions to the photos therein explain what I’ve done to improve my home the past few months. This narrative is written to exorcise my thoughts about those efforts from my brain, and to share them mostly with my extended family. If you want to slog through this, fine – but I think you’ll understand this better if you view the photos first.

The answer to the question many of you who have viewed the photos is: “Wallies.” They, and many, many more, can be found at www.wallies.com. Have a blast!

This particular round of projects started with my nasty kitchen floor. It, and the foyer, were the only portions of the floor in this condo unit that were tiled when I bought it in 1999. Even the bathrooms were carpeted at that time! My toes curled every time I walked into them in my bare feet. So, early on in my ownership here, I had the bathrooms, the hallway between the bedrooms, and the screened porch floor, which was simply wood slats, tiled for my ease of mind and comfort.

Then, in 2004, right in the middle of Hurricane Charley, I had the living room and the bedroom floors tiled. That was a very big project. To curb the cost of having that done and having a Murphy bed installed in the guest bedroom, I opted to continue living with the ugly, discolored, chipped and beat up off-white tile in the kitchen and the foyer.

Happily, even though I am retired and have no income except my Social Security benefits, my personal financial advisor (whom some of you know VERY well) has made decisions and recommendations that have resulted in allowing me to further upgrade my home. So, this year, I decided to do something about that awful kitchen floor.

I had some tiles “left over” from the previous projects. After checking with the supplier to determine which ones were still available (the tile industry is its own little world, believe me), I was able to go with most of my initial instincts and designed what I wanted for the kitchen and foyer. I called Chad, the man who had done all of the previous tiling for me here, ordered the amount of tile required to make up the difference between what I already had and what was needed to complete the job, and we got started.

Chad came here on a Friday in August, and he and his crew tore up the old tile in the kitchen and in the foyer, and removed the tile from the wall around the tub in my master bathroom that I wanted taken out, planning to convert the tub space to a shower area. I knew I could live with the resulting mess for the weekend. Chad and crew had really done a good job of covering openings from the kitchen with plastic sheets taped to the walls and had covered the refrigerator, which was by this time located in the foyer hallway/entrance to the living room, with plastic sheeting as well. It would be like camping out for the weekend.

On Monday morning, one of Chad’s crew came to my door and asked me if I had heard from Chad. When I said, “No,” he said that someone was supposed to have called me and that he’d see that that happened. And he left. Not too much later, Chad’s girlfriend called me to let me know that Chad had hurt his ankle late Sunday afternoon, and that she had just taken him to the emergency room. Someone would get back to me as soon as the situation was examined and a diagnosis made. Hmmm. The later phone call advised me that Chad had broken his ankle and that while he wasn’t going to have to use a “permanent” cast, he was supposed to stay off his feet for six weeks!

The reason I keep calling Chad to do this work for me is that he truly is a craftsman when it comes to tiling. He’s a master, as a fact. His work is impeccable. And he’s never “over charged” me for the work he’s done. He wasn’t about to send his guys out to do my job; he was going to do it himself. He was worth waiting for.

One CAN learn to live with a cement kitchen floor and a refrigerator in the hallway, if it’s necessary. It almost reminded me of some of the first apartments I rented in the seventies. It just wasn’t quite as “romantic” or adventuresome this time around. Blue never quite got used to the re-arranged furniture. And I realized just how easily I become accustomed to the door-dispenser and ice maker provided by the refrigerator I’d bought less than two years prior to this adventure. I bought bagged ice for weeks. How uncivilized! At the same time, it gave me the greatest excuse EVER for not even thinking about cleaning! Not with the constant cement dust that the exposed flooring produced. No guilt for weeks. That’s not a bad trade-off, as far as I’m concerned.

About five weeks later, Chad was ready to rock and roll again (although I think he pushed himself regarding this). He and the crew came back and laid the tile in the kitchen and foyer, repaired the cracks created by building settling in the arches he’s created in 2004 in the kitchen, foyer and hallway doorways, and re-tiled the new shower area after the plumbers had removed the tub and installed the pre-fabbed floor I purchased. The floor is smaller than the original tub area, so Chad built me the bench I wanted at the end of the area opposite the shower wall. That’s tiled with the new tile, too. Sweet.

The colors in the kitchen floor – green from the master bedroom and blue from the guest bedroom – worked out well, and I LOVE both the tile and the colors. (There’s white bathroom tile in the pantry and under the stove, and blue under the refrigerator. It may look odd to someone who moves the appliances around sometime in the future, but it sure helped me keep my costs down, and even YOU wouldn’t know it except that I’ve told you!) I hadn’t planned to put two rows of the blue along the dishwasher/sink end of the kitchen, but that’s the tile we ended up with and, in retrospect, I like the effect very much. It brings out the blue stripe defining the “dining” area, leaving the green to define the traffic pattern. Works well for me.

The foyer isn’t quite what I’d had in mind. I’d planned the charcoal stripe showing where the foyer ends and the living room begins (the charcoal is part of what was left over from tiling the fireplace and hearth). But I had meant for the rest of the foyer to be the same tile that is in the hallway between the bedrooms. I must not have communicated to Chad that he should use the leftover tile from the living room, which is lighter, in the coat closet. That’s where he started the darker “hall” tile – and ran out of that tile when he got to the area right inside the front door. I knew I had enough of the living room tile to fill in that space, and that I’d be using a rug there, so I told him to just go ahead and finish it with the rest of the leftover living room tile.

Being the craftsman that he is, Chad insisted that the result needed to look as though it were planned that way. He studied the area to be finished, counted the remaining tile several times, then took one uncut tile and placed it right in the middle of the area, to start a diamond pattern. All of the other tiles in the inset are cut to fit. He did all of the cutting and fitting before he applied the adhesive, to make certain it would come out “right.” It looks terrific! And that’s another reason I’ll never let anyone else tile my floors as long as he’s around, even if I have to wait even more weeks for him to be able to do my jobs. (I really don’t like putting a rug there, but it gets wet here in Florida – at least occasionally - and one MUST wipe one’s feet dry before walking on tile or it’s Oopsy-Daisy-kaboom.)

Well, with all of these new colors and a “new” bathroom, I then decided that my bathroom had to be stripped of the old dowdy wall paper and painted. And if I was going to do that to one bathroom, NOW was the time to get rid of the gray(!) wall paper in the guest bathroom, too. And if I was going to get the bathrooms re-painted, I might as well get the bedrooms painted, too. I’m pretty sure I didn’t have the bedrooms painted when I first moved in; they’d been freshly, but poorly, painted when the former owner was preparing the unit for selling. That had been excuse enough for me to not incur the expense of re-painting at that time.

So off I happily went to the local paint store to choose some colors for the two bedrooms and the master bathroom (I had plenty of the green paint from the kitchen when I had the funky pink wall paper in there stripped and the walls painted in 2004 during the other tiling job). That was FUN. I offered to pay an acquaintance of mine to do the painting, and he and his wife gladly accepted my proposition. They did a great job, and the place was looking better than ever.

Now, finally, it was my turn to get in on the act!

I had known all along that I wasn’t going to change my bedroom much except for the light green color on the walls; I love my bedroom. I bought the window scarf some time ago just to soften up the lines of the window. I had purchased a bed skirt and accompanying quilt and pillow shams after I stayed in Lu’s bedroom during our train trip to California (and I put the green quilt away and will use it only when the last one “from Mom” is too shabby to have on the bed anymore). I knew I wanted to put something on the wall above the headboard, but hadn’t found anything yet that suited me. The framed print that is there now was originally above the computer in the corner of the living room. I first saw the print in a catalog years ago and loved it immediately. It finally dawned on me that it belonged in my bedroom. Above my armoire I display items that were all hand-made for me by my children when they were quite young. Micah made “Ekim,” the teddy bear, when he was in first grade, with the supervision and assistance of his father. Several years later, Daisy embroidered a sampler for me when she began doing needlework. And a couple of years after that, Mandy created the pulled-yarn turtle. I have cherished all three of these originals since the moment I received each one of them – and I will for the rest of my life. To the left of the armoire hangs the rug-and-paint “60 Digits” 60th birthday gift Daisy and her children – Ryan, Kate and Caroline – made for me. On the floor below “60 Digits” sits the hamper that my sisters and I used when we were children. It seemed a lot larger way back then!

I wanted my bathroom to be lovely without being fussy. I was originally planning to put a “chair rail” along the line between the two colors I chose for it, but just couldn’t find anything that suited me. Then I remembered that I had seen various ivy borders on the “wallies” web site when I went there after ordering the palm trees I put on the doors of the Murphy bed from a catalog. So I went back into the web site and found just what I needed to finish my bathroom in a way that pleases my sense of sight – and helps to cover a few flaws in the walls! (Wallies are cut-outs prepared the same as pre-pasted wall paper. You just get ‘em wet and stick ‘em up on the wall – or wherever they’ll stick. They are fantastic! And not too terribly expensive.) The big medicine cabinet (which I had Chad install while he was here) had been a gift from Kert. He had ordered two of them when he remodeled his unit before he moved in. His unit has a half-bath rather than a second bathroom, and while one of the cabinets worked fine in his Master bathroom, the other one is too deep for the half-bath and covers the outlet by the sink. So he gave it to me. I was delighted to receive it – I disliked the wall of mirror above the vanities and commodes in both of my bathrooms from the git-go. (The removal of those mirrors was the major reason the wall treatment in both bathrooms had to be changed – the wall behind both of the mirrors had never been finished in any way!) So with the new shower area, paint and wallies, the new HUGE medicine cabinet, some new towels, rugs, and switch plates, I now have a bathroom that creates a relaxing mood for me, and with which I am very pleased.

The light blue I chose for the guest bedroom walls pleased me so much that I realized I was going to change the atmosphere of the whole room. I had purchased an inexpensive futon last year when I figured out that I could open it and the Murphy bed at the same time. With the single bed in there, too, I can actually sleep five people comfortably in that room. So any of you who find yourselves traveling to Florida, feel free to take advantage of my hospitality. Putting the futon in there had allowed me to get rid of the monstrous entertainment center that I’d originally bought for the living room and moved to the guest bedroom when I discovered that it covered too much of the hearth I’d had built when the living room floor and fireplace were tiled in 2004. I donated the entertainment center to Good Will (because they’ll come out and move the darn thing), and started scaling down the guest bedroom. The retro look of the west wall could come from old photos of the 80’s. With the exception of the CD player and the futon, everything else in that collection DID come from the 80’s! By the way, my Corner of Love displays things that have been given to me by family members. The two plaques on the upper left are ones Molly made and gave to me way back when; the framed lace was from Rebecca years ago; Sheri gave me the counted cross-stitch; Doug made the machine-stitched tree for me a LONG time ago; Tom’s free-form crayon drawing was done at that time, too.

I gave the headboard of the single bed to a friend and made a daybed out of it. The wall it’s placed on originally housed all my autographed baseball cards, but I knew I didn’t want them there any longer.

So I created my Hall of Fame. Now people can actually look at my collection; the hall has some personality, I got to dig out the great baseball posters Allen gave me years ago and DO something with them, and I finally figured out a solution to a problem that had arisen a couple of years ago. The original circuit breaker box had to be replaced, and the replacement box wasn’t as big as the original one, leaving an unfinished gap between the top of the box and the wall above it. I had meant to ask the “mudder” of Chad’s crew to fix the gap, but he was done with that part of his work so quickly, and had cleaned his equipment and bucket, that I had decided I could fix it myself with tape and spackling compound. Wrong! Maybe someone else could have done that, but I made a mess of it. Then inspiration hit. I had seen a “sports themed” wallie when I last visited the site that I had liked because it was designed as a window looking out onto a golf course. So back to the site I went, and found it on sale! Must have been my lucky day! Getting it placed over the surface of the circuit breaker box was something of a challenge, but I’m happy with the resulting effect. And during this part of the project, Molly sent me the copy of the Red Riders page with Dad’s photo on it! Back to Michael’s for another poster frame. And the poster is now on the door to the guest bathroom. What great timing!

Back to the guest bedroom: I had added the tropical switch plates in there as part of the whole new look of the room. Inspiration regarding wallies came to me once again as I looked at the blank wall above the daybed. It was begging for excitement. I’d seen the big palm tree in a catalog several times, but had never known just where I’d put it. I knew this time. I originally paired the tree with the small picture/almost hologram of the moon that I’d purchased from the day center/work shop while I was still working. Then we got the water color paintings from Lucy (Allen had sent her the watercolors with our Halloween package), and one was just plain perfect to hang on a wall that looks tropical in that blue room with the pink accents. Serendipity abounds.

As an aside here, I’ll mention that every time I went back to the wallies web site I made a point to look at the wine niche wallie. It was another one I had seen early on and had wanted dearly, but never knew where I’d put it. When I ordered the palm tree wallie, I just went ahead and ordered the wine niche, too. It was driving me crazy. I had it here for a while. In the meantime, I had found the palm that is now in my foyer at Publix grocery store, of all places, for $10, and had brought it home, considering for the wall over my bed. The minute I walked into the house, though, I decided I wanted it right there in the foyer – the colors are perfect for that spot. When I finally realized that the framed print I had above my computer was what I wanted above my bed, I found, of course, the perfect show-off place for the wine niche.

I had ordered the guest bathroom wallies early on. Ever since the year Mandy sent me the pink flamingo shower caddy, I have known that when I got the opportunity, that horrid gray guest bathroom was going to CHANGE into a flamingo bathroom. I was ready. And I had a blast. I had found the mirror on sale months ago. Once it was up, I just had to change the light fixture. And I slapped up wallies with abandon. – I had seen the metal flamingo wall hanging months and months ago at my fav College Park store – Bijou’s Boutique. It was sitting right inside the front door where it couldn’t be missed. Alas, the price was so high on it that I simply had to sigh and walk away from it. But if I’ve ever coveted anything, it was that wall hanging. In November, I stopped to make a deposit at the drive-through of a branch bank in College Park that is directly across the street from the Boutique. As I pulled out of the drive-through, I realized there was a huge banner in the window of the store, advertising a year-end clearance sale going on (I’ve also discovered since that the store cleared inventory because they were planning on remodeling, which is nearly finished) – and everything in the store was 70% or more off! Well, this girl drove around the block and found herself a place to park. Then she marched into the Boutique and discovered – yippee! – that the wall hanging was still in the same spot – and 70% less expensive. Hurrah, hurrah, hurrah. It was MINE. I spent about an hour and a half in the store – any number of Christmas presents this year are from Bijou’s Boutique; man, did I have fun! I found the flamingo hooks that are now on the bathroom side of the door to the guest bedroom that day, too. (And a similar one with horses on it. Where do you suppose that one went?) Talk about serendipity – what a day THAT one was! The shower curtain is Kmart. Hey, it’s what I wanted. Most of the other accents have been gifts from family members. You know who you are. Allen had given me the large ceramic flamingo last year for Christmas. It’s really beautiful; photos don’t do it justice. At our Board meeting in early December, I overheard one of the women talking about College Park, and asked her if she ever goes into Bijou’s Boutique. I told her about finding the metal flamingo wall hanging on sale. The next day she showed up here at my place with the hand towels. She told me she had bought them a while ago, not really knowing why. She said that when I told her the previous evening about buying the wall hanging at the Boutique, she knew exactly what she was supposed to do with the hand towels. Holy Moley. So I showed off the guest bathroom to her. She loved it! - Ryan had commented in his first email from here that he (kiddingly) thought there were too many pink accents in my place. He was here BEFORE I did all of this! Just be glad you came THIS year, Ryan!

There was one thing left to do. Ever since I had the arches installed in the kitchen/foyer doorway, the foyer/living room doorway, the living room/hallway doorway and the pass-through from the kitchen to the living room, I’ve wanted to do something to soften the square lines of the wall above the glass wall/door to the screened porch. Even before that, I had tried hanging several things on that portion of wall, trying to create a softer illusion above the introduction of all that glorious nature beyond the porch. After I decided that I wanted to emulate the lines of the arches, I dreamed up and subsequently discarded any number of ideas about how to do that. Most of them were too involved for me to do myself, and would have been way too expensive to have someone else create.

I had gone to Michael’s to look for cork board to create my Wall of Fame when my refrigerator art started to accumulate as the grandkids learned to draw and write (even though I had already started to switch stuff out and save previous things in a scrapbook). I found the foam board instead, which was both the exact right color and size. Then I just walked around the store, looking for ideas. I came upon a display of dowels. I liked the idea creating an “arch” with those, but even the narrowest of what was there was too thick to bend as much as I needed. But there were also wooden cutouts, and I began to form an idea. I went back to Michael’s many times – that’s a dangerous place to browse! There was only one time I walked out of there with exactly the articles I had gone in intending to purchase; every other time I had picked up something that struck my fancy. Yikes!

Then one day I ended up in the Ace Hardware store in College Park. I take my car to College Park, still, for servicing every four months. I love walking there while the car is being serviced, and visiting my favorite stores – after treating myself to breakfast at the College Park Café. That’s a four-times-a-year indulgement I thoroughly enjoy. I saw the kids’ Adirondack chair at Ace, and wanted it to create the planter for the front porch, along with a black bowl I had found months earlier. So I browsed Ace for a while – and found the same dowels that I’d seen at Michael’s – but including dowels that were just smaller enough in circumference that they bent well enough to use to create arches where I wanted them. Eureka!

After I created the panels that are now on that wall, I painted them with the paint that had been used after the living room was tiled. There was plenty of that left that hadn’t even been opened, so I took the bucket to the paint store and asked them to shake it up for me, which they willingly did. The effect of the panels is very subtle; in certain light, they are hardly visible. But everyone who has seen my “frieze” has raved about it. Comments have been that they look “like those old Greek buildings with stuff carved in them” and that it “looks like plaster.” It probably wouldn’t matter if I didn’t get complements, *I* like the effect and am happy with the results. But it sure is nice to get affirmation that what I did looks nice, and “right.”

So, finally, I am finished with this phase.

The most difficult part of the entire project was making the baseboards in my bathroom look right. They had been replaced when I had the floor tiled in 2000, but I hadn’t realized, with the whitish wall paper in there, how heavily they had been caulked, and much of the old wall paper that I’d torn off was still clinging to the top edge of the baseboard. Putting the dark green paint on the wall showed every flaw and irregularity. I had hoped that a second coat of paint on the baseboard, using painter’s tape to create a straight line, would fix the problem. As if. Boy, was I naïve. So I ended up digging out old caulk and bits of wallpaper for days, preparing the baseboard for another try. I literally worked my fingers to the bone; didn’t realize the first day that the knuckle areas on my right hand were suffering friction abrasion from the wall. It was band-aid city from that point on. Of course I managed to gouge the cheap wood of the baseboards as I dug; that had to be fixed, then, with spackling compound/wood-fill, and sanded down before I could paint both the wall area immediately above the baseboards and the baseboards themselves again. It was a real learning experience for me. And I did it! I made them look right. So there.

The second-most challenge was the “frieze.” I have never considered myself good at doing crafts things. And here I was, about to decorate a living room wall with poster board, products comparable to popsicle sticks, and glue. Lots of Elmer’s Glue. Lots and lots of Elmer’s Glue. (I viewed my options regarding adhesives and decided that if Elmer’s Glue was good enough to hang Ethel’s kitchen cabinets – I’ll never forget her telling us of her amazement that that’s how they were hung – and that the cabinets stayed up there until Doug pulled them down, then, by gosh, I could build my frieze with the stuff.)

The first of the three panels was excruciatingly tedious. I had really only a vague idea of what it was I wanted to do, not how to go about it. I measured any number of times and hoped that poster board would work if it were double thickness for most of each panel. I decided on six cut-to-size dowels for each side of each panel – then had to experiment with different instruments to find one that cut the dowels cleanly. (Ended up using a wire cutter.) And I hoped that six dowels on each side of the panel, glued down very, very well, would “hold” the two full-length dowels that were going to create the arch effect well enough to – well – create the arch effect. Waiting for all that glue to dry drove me nuts.

To give this effort the best chance of success I could muster, I decided to taper the ends of the full-length dowels so that they would wedge under the cut-to-size dowels I had now glued to the poster board. O.K. – this wasn’t a huge deal but, being craft-making-challenged, I gained a whole new respect for those who whittle well. I had been wise enough to buy more dowels than I thought I would use, and it was a darned good thing I did. I learned that to do this successfully, one has to remove very tiny slivers of wood, one at a time, to achieve the desired effect. The thought of creating an entire animal or something by applying this method fills me with absolute awe. But whittle I did, and ended up with some tapered dowel ends, which I jammed as best I could under the dowels along the sides of the panel. And I poured on more glue.

Hot darn, it worked. So I started sticking on palm trees and circles. That part was fun. With the exception of the approximately-the-same placement of the trees on all three panels, they aren’t and never were intended to be exactly alike. I went free-form all the way. If anyone ever wants to check out the placement of the 180 circles on each panel to see where they differ, he/she can be my guest. So I let all of THAT glue dry for hours, then painted the thing and let that dry overnight. Gave it a second coat of paint the next morning, let that dry most of the day and hung it. The three panels are up there with industrial strength Velcro. You could hang a truck on your wall with that stuff. Whoever takes those panels off there eventually will have to have the drywall replaced. Take my word for it. The other two panels went much more quickly – or at least they seemed to. I still had to wait for the glue to dry. That was O.K., I got other stuff done during those times.

And I learned something about myself. I’ve never been good at crafting stuff because I never tried anything that was important to me before. The patience I was able to marshal doing this was because I really wanted to create this frieze. I impressed myself, doggone it, and I am exceptionally happy with what I made.

The only other thing that presented challenge was affixing the window/golf wallie over the circuit breaker box. I had to cut the middle out of the wallie that would cover the frame of the breaker box, and cut the middle out of that part to affix the separate piece to the door in the frame. I unscrewed the frame from the wall, laid it on the wallie to draw the outline of it, took a deep breath and started cutting with an Exacto knife (well, not technically Exacto, but I’m not going to go look at the knife right now to remind myself of the name brand). Same thing with the piece for the door, which wasn’t quite as simple because I wasn’t about to detach the door from the frame. I applied the “outer” part of the cut wallie to the wall first, then the frame and door pieces while the frame was still out of the wall. Because the frame part is molded to give it some contour, the pieces don’t fix exactly, but once I got the whole thing back on the wall and painted in where there were a few gaps, the effect is pretty neat. I didn’t know how to disguise the handle/latch to the door, so I didn’t even try. At any rate the wall looks a whole lot better than it did with that rough gap/hole above the box, and I got to decorate a little more using a wallie. Cool.

I didn’t replace bathroom vanities/sinks this round of improvements, and neither did I replace kitchen cabinets and the counter-top, although all of those things could certainly use a makeover. But all that can wait another two or three years. 2008 will see new tile on the screened porch. Chad had planned to replace a broken tile there when he did the kitchen/foyer, but when he pulled the broken one up, he discovered that the sub-flooring he’d laid in 2000 had deteriorated due to termites. I called the termite control contractor, whose rep claimed that they had no responsibility, of course, because they weren’t the contractor in 2000. Oh, well. So I’ve got an old shower curtain duct taped over that area now, and have covered it with a towel. It’ll be fun to choose different tile for the porch. When I first had it done, I chose the gray flagstone to blend with the paint on the walls. Now that I’ve tiled the living room, I’ll want something that will “extend” that floor out onto the porch. Either that or I’ll try to find something similar to the darker tile around the fireplace and hearth, to emphasize that are more.

The only other thing I want to do is replace the screen door at my front door. The one that’s there is a cheap one that the contractors hung after they trashed the one they removed during the rehabilitation of the building following termite damage that occurred before I bought my place. I want something nicer and better looking.

So for now, the only thing I can think of to add is the fact that if you want to see any of this live and in person, instead of just viewing photos, you’re going to have to visit me. There’s an ongoing open invitation to you to do just that.

I hoped you’ve enjoyed your tour. I’ve certainly enjoyed creating it and telling you about it.

Happy New Year to All! ‘Til next time, Vicki