Tag: Uncategorized

The only appropriate way to follow that title is this: Hell. Yes. 

The last weeks of 2018 were nothing short of a gift. An incredible time when I had the time, the energy, and all the materials to spend all my evenings out in the shop, building all of the things…

Which basically amounts to a million cabinets.

Okay, not a million. But enough to drastically change the storage situation in my house, which feels like nothing short of a million-cabinet miracle. This house has been a disaster for the better part of a decade.

After the window seat and the back of the breakfast counter, I started on the laundry room (and only because my mom decided to start cleaning it out “just in case I wanted to do some work in there”… because moms know, you guys.)

Technically this is an old pic, but it looked basically like this:

In just two evenings and one Saturday, I built two pantry-style closets for this room, which required no shortage of wine and floor space…

Nothing like assembling cabs on an uneven garage floor, right?

Still. It worked.

Let me tell you, after The Great Cabinet Painting Month of 2016 I never thought I would have to dodge through an obstacle course of half-painted shelves to get through my kitchen ever again, but WELCOME TO 2019 GUYS.

In all fairness, this only lasted a day. And then, this…

Listen, it’s not finished, okay? (And honestly, when in the history of this fifteen– fifteen?!?!– year website have you ever seen me legit finish a project? Never? Okay. Well let’s not go crazy and get our hopes up now.)

There will be uppers on top of these, shelves between them on the bottom for the laundry baskets, and a bar between them at the top for hangers. Plus, paint. But mostly its not finished because that very pink floor tile is on the brink of being evicted once and for all. (I know, I know, I’ve said that before. I really do mean it this time thought.) So no crown molding or final finishes because everything is going to have to be moved out of this room at some point this year. But I wanted the cabs to be functional in the meantime. And they are.

On one side I gained a functional cleaning storage closet (which holds the rarely-used vacuum, never-used steam mop, and other assorted cleaning supplies that I like to buy on those rare occasions that I want to feel like a grown up) and on the other side an even more functional pantry for canned goods, egg cartons, and other  kitchen items that aren’t used on a daily basis (I’m looking at you, eleven cans of black beans, because WHY.)

Also, since I was on a role with the “let’s build cabinets to hide all my shit” theme, we really need to talk about the mudroom, which most recently looked like this…

The mudroom has been a constant source of “what the shit is going on in here?” because, seriously, what the shit has been going on in here… for the last seven years?

I just can’t with this room. I mean, I can… for like 2 weeks. And then a project happens (or I build a gym in my house) and then all of the shit just ends up in the mudroom again.

So I finally gave up and built a bigass cabinet. Because in my world right now, you can solve any problem at all by building a cabinet. (Need more storage? Cabinet. Insomnia? Cabinet. Procrastinating a workout? Cabinet. Cat died? Build a million fucking cabinets.)

For real. This thing is so big I had to assemble it in the room because even with my mom’s help we didn’t think we’d be able to carry it assembled from the garage.

Hello, beautiful.

For days after we cleaned this room out my mom would walk into the house and say, “I just can’t believe this.” Because you could walk through it without tripping. You know where you’ve set the bar in your life when that’s what impresses your mother.

Also, two things:

1.) I also built upper cabs for all of these, so they’re floor-to-ceiling storage.

2.) There will be doors on all of these beasts eventually. Probably because I’m going to buy them from somewhere since I do not have the patience for door-building right now.

AND SPEAKING OF DOORS.

Hey, here’s another thing I did.

Remember back when I built this cabinet? (When it was almost a retro-curved-wraparound-shelf-thing?) Yeah.

Well, here’s what it looked like a few days ago…

And here’s what it looks like now.

Also, while I was at it, I painted every-damn-thing, including the new breakfast bar area…

And the window seat.

You guys, this window seat is weirdly (but officially) my favorite spot in the house. It doesn’t have a cushion on it yet so my ass hurts all the time, but I still sit there every morning, some evenings when I’m still working on my computer, and basically any time I just need a break in the house. I have no idea why this space that I’ve decidedly ignored for the last seven years is now my favorite, but I’m just going to roll with it.

While I’m sitting here typing this from my window-seat, let’s just take a minute and reflect on this kitchen seven-ish years ago…

And today…

I mean.

It’s not finished. But if you look at it in the right light, and squint your eyes a little bit, it almost feels like a real house and not a construction zone (for the moment.) Seven years, you guys. And a solid three with this room under construction.

So, yeah, I built some motherfucking cabinets. And I feel great about it. Sometimes I feel like if I’m not telling a good “before and after” story (you know, one with all those pretty before and after shots we’re so used to seeing these days) that I don’t have a story to tell at all. But you know what? This is my life. My amazing, messy, beautiful, perpetually unfinished life. And, lets be honest, for girl who spends a lot of time by herself in a garage with a bottle of wine and a bunch of old power tools? I have a lot more fun than I probably should.

And if you’re here reading this, cheering a little inside for pictures of a kitchen that actually looks like a kitchen again (uh, with plywood floors), it’s because you’ve been in this with me for the long-haul. Getting invested in projects and stories that may take years (or decades? please god, not decades) to come to a satisfying conclusion.

Seriously? Thanks for that. And for all the support when things get tough, or when I just can’t quite figure out how to tell the stories that need to be told.

2019 is shaping up to be a pretty epic year.

P.S. Oh, sorry, did you think I was done building cabinets? Because I also totally started on the built-ins over at the Lake House…

I’m not done being the crazy-cabinet lady (who can create makeshift sawhorses out of patio chairs) yet, you guys.

Source: Wherein I Built Some Motherf*cking Cabinets

Okay, listen, to be fair, it’s a mostly finished window seat.

And at this exact moment in time–the moment where I’m on a roll building assorted cabinetry, and my mom and I are having a blast working between our two houses on the weekends, and there hasn’t been a farm crisis in the last couple of weeks, and I’ve actually got the time and energy to sit down and write this post–things are good. Really good. I’m living the dream (as long as we all understand “the dream” is covered in sawdust and still doesn’t shower or do the dishes quite as much as is socially acceptable.)

But let me also tell you that while things in this moment are good, it’s only because I have been living right on the cusp of “what the actual fuck” for the last several months, unsure if I’m going to tip right over the edge into crazy-squirrel-lady-who-has-given-up-on-doing-anything-she-loves-ever-again or, you know, manage to claw my way out of that hole until things feel right in my life again.

(I’m not joking about the Crazy Squirrel Lady part. They invaded the house and started hiding walnuts in my laundry.)

Here’s the thing. My life is not now, nor will it ever be, a study in balance. I’m a creature of extremes. Of periods of time when I’m in the grips of a big project or a physical challenge and feel like I have the energy and vision and drive to take on the world… and times when I don’t. When I feel the absence of that energy so acutely that even though I know that it’s just a recovery period, and that I will find myself engaged and energized in my own life again at some point in the future, there’s a part of me that says (very loudly and incessantly), “Welp, that’s it. I guess I’m never going to do anything good again, and everything feels off in my life, and I’m just going to be exhausted forever. Awesome.”

I’m compelled to say that out loud, because what I really want to do is skip over all the things that have sucked lately and just talk about is how awesome it feels to be building all kinds of shit right now. But, even though I haven’t been in the right space to update this site as frequently as I used to, telling an authentic story is still the most important thing to me.

And life is (almost surprisingly) good right now, but only because I’m on the other side of some shit that has been really hard.

First, because I burned through a ton of energy this summer making a pretty big career change and spending a lot more time away from the farm that I’m used to.

And because I spent a solid 8 months training for a solo 50 mile hike in Iceland…

(I crushed it–finishing in 2.5 days instead of the 4-5 I planned for– but also very quickly felt the post-adventure blues. It’s a real thing.)

And then because the very worst thing happened… I lost Bubs.

I mean, I did not misplace him, obviously. I lost him to cancer (which, I know, sounds very melodramatic for a cat. After being otherwise healthy and acting normal he stopped eating one week, and then I found out his intestines were riddled with tumors and he didn’t make it out of the surgery to try to remove them.)

I get that cats are not humans, and for most people cats are not even dogs, but this cat in particular has been my companion for the last 12 years. He was literally the inspector for the very first big project I completed on my first house (the first badass pergola)…

And has been with me through every house, every relationship, every project…

And every blog post since…

I understand all of the intellectual things about how he had a great life, and we got to spend 12 years just hanging out together…

But it still fucking sucks, and I miss his cat face every day.

(Although I did find a desiccated bat on the middle of the living room rug two weeks after he died and was like HOW ARE YOU STILL DOING THIS TO ME WITH THE BATS, BUBS?! I do not miss waking up to dead bats in the bed, but I do miss my cat.)

So, that was hard. 

Not only is it tough not to have him around, but within a couple of weeks, the squirrels moved out of the attic and started hiding walnuts around my house. (The one I found under the covers of my bed was the last straw.)

Also, the mice started hiding Bubs old cat food in my shoes.

That’s not… I’m not making that up. It happened a handful of times before I realized some creature was doing this to me on purpose.

I mean, I knew Bubs was good at catching shit, but I had no idea how much work he was doing on a daily basis to keep the house free of rodents.

So, just to recap: New job, big adventure, post-adventure blues, dead cat, rodent invasion, and also this has been a tough year for a lot of my friends in a lot of different ways, so just add all of that into the general mix of hard shit and, oh, I’m sorry, did you come here to read about a window seat?

Yeah, so, I managed to come out on the other side of that mess of feelings, a little worse for wear, but with my sanity mostly intact. And then I built a window seat.

As one does.

I had my HVAC guys come and move the baseboard heat for me because it required a bit of finagling. Then I bought a piece of 10′ plywood, made a napkin drawing, and went to town.

It looks civilized from the outside, but the inside is just a mess of blocking.

Originally I was going to make the storage in this thing drawers (see drunk napkin sketch above) but then I realized that after I accounted for the baseboard heat, the drawers would only be 5″ deep. So I went for the next best thing…

Flip top! (A couple of stainless steel piano hinges did the trick.)

I only expect to access this storage space once or twice a year (it currently contains my window AC unit and a bunch of canning jars.)

And just to provide context for the size of this beast…

It’s over 9′ long. Like everything else in this house, weirdly oversized, but we’re just going with it.

I finished the top of the bench with iron-on veneer on the cut ends…

Legitimately the only use this iron ever gets. Also, if you ever have qualms about iron-on veneer, I also used this exact stuff on the tables I built for the office at my last job. Those tables have been in the common area of that office (used by 50 people or so daily for the last 3+ years) and the veneer held up beautifully.

Back to the project at-hand though…

The last step was to trim out the front so that it looks a bit more in line with my cabinets.

Trim is always the critical factor in taking a project from “what the hell are you doing?” to “Huh. That looks pretty damn good.”

Also, you can’t beat the view…

It needs to be painted, obviously, and I’m in the process of ordering a custom cushion, and then if you need to find me after that, I’ll just be laying in this window seat for the next eternity.

BUT THAT’S NOT ALL.

Did I or did I not say I was on a roll with the cabinet-building?

After three years of staring at the ass-end of these cabinets, I finally got my act together and finished them.

This whole project was a study in creative problem solving and using what I had on-hand.

First, I wasn’t entirely sure how I wanted to handle the trim on these, but I knew I wanted to replicate the look of the cabinets because the big blank panel that used to be there (before I added a 3rd cabinet) kind of drove me nuts.

Because I custom-built that end cabinet with a wrap-around toe-kick, I had to get creative with the trim (which also meant replacing some of the facing on that cabinet because I didn’t think far enough in advance 2 years ago, apparently.)

And then, of course, once I figured out how I wanted to do the trim, I found out that none of my local lumber suppliers sell 3/8″ thick trim boards in any kind of usable length and width. Turns out, however, that I have a bunch of 3/8″ thick tongue and groove pine planks from an unfinished project upstairs, and if you rip the tongue and the groove off?

Perfect trim boards.

But then there was the question about how I should hold the the pieces of trim in place while the glue dried in the spots that had no usable clamping or nailing surfaces.

No problem.

Also, funny story, that is not paint in my hair. That’s legit all the gray hair the last four months seven years life has given me that I stopped coloring for a minute because I was too busy not having a meltdown to care about.

Good news, I did not have a meltdown. My hair is very gray. And the back-side of my kitchen cabinets look like this.

 

I am considering that the bottom trim board really needs to be a bit beefier, and weighing that against my desire to screw around with this anymore when I’ve got a couple more drawers, and secret cabinets, and at least seven sheets of plywood’s worth of built-ins I’m hoping to get done soon.

I’m telling you, it was a long, hard end to summer but I’ve got a wave of energy when it comes to building cabinets right now, and I’m going to ride it as long as I can.

Source: The Good, The Hard, and The Half-Finished Window Seat

It turns out there are good and bad things about the Lake House in November. The bad thing is that it legitimately is too cold to spend all of the daylight hours out on the kayaks. The good news is, since I’m not spending all of the daylight hours I have available out in the kayak, there’s plenty of time to work on some other projects in the house.

Remember how I said my mom and I are going to take it nice and slow with projects around the Lake House?

For once I was not lying. We are actually taking it nice and slow with projects around the Lake House.

My mom spends most of her time here, but occasionally she’ll spend a night down in Ohio during the week, and my new favorite thing to do in the evenings is to raid my mom’s wine cabinet fridge and paint things in the house while she’s not there.

Swear to god, I “borrowed” those sweatpants from a college boyfriend 17 years ago and they are now a testament to all of the rooms I have painted white in my life. Also, if you’re thinking, “wow, you really don’t get a lot of paint on your pants, if that’s what 17 years worth of painting looks like” you should see my hair.

First of all: HOW EVEN.

Second of all: While it’s annoying that I literally cannot walk near a paint can without unintentionally creating some kind of skunk stripe on my head à la the cat in Pepé Le Pew… honestly? I also really only feel like myself when I’m singing loudly to the radio in an empty room, late at night, with a roller in hand and paint in my hair.

Projects at my own house always feel very complicated, so I’m grateful the Lake House has brought more of those easy, fun, paint-in-my-hair DIY moments back into my life.

Anyway.

All of those evenings painting paid off with a newly white living room (and new couch)…

And then I may have gotten a wild hair and bought some window treatments while I was at it…

Here’s the thing, we’re not actually planning to close the shades on these windows ever, because they look right out onto the lake (obviously.) But there’s something to be said for dressing up the windows to make a space look more cozy, even if you don’t “need” to.

(For reference, the bamboo shades are from justblinds.com, the sheers are from Pottery Barn (in alabaster), the rods are from World Market, and the curtain rings/clips are from amazon because they’re a hell of a lot cheaper than the ones PB will try to sell you. Also, none of that shit is sponsored or affiliated or anything like that, it’s just what I bought under the influence of a bottle of my mom’s wine one night.)

We also decided to put a console table behind the couch to give us a place to set things while we’re lounging in there (like we do) and also because literally the only place in the entire house where you can get more than one bar of cell service is next to that window. So we needed somewhere to set our phones so we could stream Christmas music while hanging our stockings. Obv.

What I love about this is that it’s actually the table I built a few years ago out of old barn wood we cleaned up on the farm to hold the TV in my living room, which became obsolete back when I partially re-did that room a couple of years ago. Technically I was using it behind my own couch “temporarily” because it was not at all the right size, but I built that damn thing with my own hands and didn’t want to get rid of it. And now I don’t have to, because it fits perfectly behind my mom’s couch. I do have to build another right-sized table for my own living room in the near future though, because I learned the hard way that I no longer have a good place to set my beer when I’m watching the best Christmas movie of all time.

Also, while we’re on the subject of Christmas, you may have noticed that the Lake House living room also looks much cozier because we put a tree up in there. Which is true. It’s actually a nice compact artificial tree I had been storing up in my attic for the last couple of years. If any of you are wondering how my mom and I spend our time together on the farm and at the lake… this pretty much sums it up.

After we successfully got the tree down (without being attacked by and/or killing any wild animals) my mom looked at me and said, “Why does this always happen to us??”

I don’t know, Mom. But it sure is an adventure, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Source: Lake House: Living Room and Other Shenanigans

The last few weeks have been a whirlwind of big changes, new projects, a very cold learning curve, oh, and snow…

Because why not, Michigan.

So, here’s the deal. My mom and I took possession of the lake house a little less than a month ago. It was still nice (and light) enough a month ago that I had two glorious weeks of rushing home from work with just enough time to get 30 minutes of paddling in on the lake before the sun went down.

And on my very first evening out in the kayak, I came across this…

Yeah, that is a real, huge, bald eagle. Pretty amazing (especially considering I’ve lived a half-mile from this lake for seven years and have never once seen a bald eagle.)

My mom even managed to get out on the water her first full weekend at the lake.

And then, of course, the snow came.

We’ve been simultaneously trying to 1.) get some furniture in the lake house (so my mom isn’t sleeping on an air mattress forever.) 2.) Spend a little time on the water before the deep freeze, 3.) Prep the farm for winter, and 4.) Prep the lake house for winter. Which, it turns out, is a lot to do in just a couple of weeks, and is exactly how I ended up in the lake, in November, in my long johns…

Our new lake neighbors are the previous owners of my mom’s house and have been so helpful with educating us on how things work around here. They even took most of the dock out for us, but I insisted on doing the last section, just so I could get a feel for it.

And also because I wanted to lose all feeling in my knees, apparently.

We will not be doing that task in November from here on out. (Or I need to invest in a pair of waders, stat.)

Luckily, other than figuring out kayak storage, there’s not much more that is needed to “winterize” the lake house. (Don’t get me started on the list for the farm though.)

However, we have been trying to make some quick (and small) progress on making the lake house feel more like home.

We were originally going to try to re-use some hand-me down and leftover furniture from the farm, but I really felt strongly that the only way to make the space work in the living room is with a sectional. (Which I decided by making a mock-up of a potential couch out of empty boxes and paper towels, as one does.)

Don’t knock the boxes-and-towels method. It worked.

The couch is the Bayard modular sectional from Wayfair. The bottom cushions are very firm but not uncomfortable, price was reasonable, and it was just the right size for this room.

There’s still a fair amount to do in this room. We did paint the walls white, but there’s still some caulking and swapping out of electrical switches and outlets that needs to be done. And we’re working on the fireplace…

We’re also waiting for some window treatments to arrive, and keeping our eyes out for a good deal on a bistro table and some bar stools. And very soon I’m going to find a weekend to spend in the shop, knocking out some built-ins for either side of the fireplace AND for this little project I have going on in my own kitchen…

I wish we had a little more time on the lake this year, but I’ll tell you what… after a summer of travel, it feels real good to just get back to work on things. I just don’t feel like myself if I’m not covered in paint and sawdust most days.

Source: Lake Life and Learning Curves