A blog that Kaitlin will never read.

This is a great story - it and it relates to this blog so I thought I'd share with all you blog followers!

As you may know 1 week ago was my 29th birthday... and on Sunday we went to my parent's house to celebrate. My 17 year old sister said something... For the life of me I can't remember what (no cracks about being old) and I said "You didn't know that? I write about it all the time on my blog. You should check it out."

Her response: "I hate blogs. Actually I just hate that word. Blog. Yuck. So I refuse to read them."

Keep in mind this is MY BIRTHDAY dinner. What a great way to celebrate! She tells me she won't read about all my hard work on my house blog because she does not like the word blog. What a nice gesture! So sweet!

So I say, "Whatevs. Don't get all emo on me. I like to blog, yo."

You should have heard the laughter. I mean gut wretching laughter.
Dave is sitting there saying, "What's emo?" My mom pokes her head out of the kitchen and says "What's going on?" Kaitlin yells, "Kristen is trying to be cool!"

So now we know that Kaitlin doesn't read this and we can anything we want about her! Ha! That's the end of my story.

Oh and that is also the story of how Dave learned the definition of emo. (Which if you don't know, means "emotional" and is one step away from "goth." Surprised I knew that one, huh? :)

Better late than never...

I've neglected my poor blog! I'm so sorry to all our readers - it's been way too long!! I promise to do better! So let me jump right in and get you up to speed on what we've been doing at Ardsley.

The hallway is about 3/4 done... it's been stripped and primed and is ready for a color. Now I just have to go pick one. Dave did a fantastic job replacing that old light. If you've ever been to our house you know that the hallway is like 3 feet shorter than all the surrounding rooms. I'm not really sure why - but it does make for an interesting little crawl space in the attic. The light in the hallway was a weird looking mini chandelier... and had about 30 years of dust and mold on the top of it, stuck between the light and the ceiling.

GROSS. I did take off the jewels and save them... they might come in handy for an art project!

What we replaced that old light with was a normal looking globe. I am truly amazed by what Dave did to get that light ON. There were actually 8 wires coming out of the ceiling. We have no idea what 7 of them do... but we know one is for the light and it works just fine!! What should have been an easy project ended up taking all day - but I think the emd result is worth it.

In our travels I also came across something intersesting... I found an old Ad in a magazine for OUR OVEN. I'm not talking about our type of oven - but OUR EXACT OVEN!!! Take a look - it's called the Americana...

And this is my stove that I cook on every night.

I actually know it's an ad for our oven because our oven actually says Americana on the front. But isn't that funny? Dave did not find the humor in it. He thought it was incredibly depressing that we had such old appliances. I thought it was quite telling of what 1970 was like, when the previous owner had decorated. Obviously Mrs. Hackel opted for the brown model... not the turquoise. Look how happy that wife is. Amazing. I definitely don't look like that when I am stirring up a big pot of chilli...

A green thumb turned black...

I'm not going to lie. I'll admit it. I have no idea what I'm doing when it comes to gardening. I just sort of apply my cooking philosophy to the yard - "let's throw it all together and see if it tastes good."

Well apparently that doesn't really work with living foliage. (Sometimes it doesn't work with food either but that's another blog...)

In a matter of 4 months we have managed to KILL everything in the yard. Maybe it was the weeks of neglect as we worked so diligently on the inside of the house; we ended up really neglecting the outside of the house. Just take a look... here's the house in August when we bought it...

And here it is yesterday...

Just looks so sad doesn't it!

The grass has totally died. We've tried raking it up and watering it but so far nothing is really sprouting.

We hired a gardner to come "trim" the bushes - well he ended up cutting everything down to little nubs - and ripped out some of the stuff that was actually living. At the time we were so happy that it was at least under control - but I think he ended up killing alot of what we really loved about the yard.

We had that dead tree removed so it wouldn't fall on the house - but that 30 ton crane ended up cracking our driveway and putting some pretty big holes in our stone walkway to the front door.

The owner before us had so many flower beds - I just can't keep up. When I finish weeding one garden it's time to start on another. This one at the front of the house used to be beautiful flowers - now it's just weeds.

And a problem as of late - the paint is peeling off the bricks - in sheets! It's barely hanging on. You can peel it with your fingers. Behind the beige is a really bright pink and some white - which I can only guess is some sort of primer.

I just hope the neighbors don't turn on us before we even get to meet all of them!!

Back to work

Dave circa August 2007

Dave, last Sunday, January 2008

Yes, we are still working on the hallway. I thought these 2 photos were funny - it just goes to show you how awful that old wallpaper was.

I was not inclined to "attack" it full force like I did the other lovely wallpapered rooms, specially because it's only a hall, and you don't spend much time in it. So whenever we would have a few minutes we would take a stab at peeling some off. It started to look pretty ratty, wallpaper hanging in shreds all over the place. Finally Dave said this weekend, "I can't take it anymore - we'v got to just get rid of it." So we mustered up some courage and dove right back in the home improvement pool. We did finally get all of the paper off and now we're fixing the holes, sanding and painting it. If you don't remember - it was a lovely textured wallpaper that looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

Thankfully that was the LAST room with wallpaper that we are going to strip!! WooHoo!! We still have the "garden of Eden" wallpaper in the master bathroom, but we are definitely just Killzing right over that!

I miss the holidays already.

Well I guess the winter hibernation is over. We had a blissful 3 weeks where we did NOTHING on the house. Just went to Christmas parties, saw family, watched lots of movies on TV and ate like the world was ending tomorrow. Dave made us get back to work on Sunday this past weekend. I was totally against it - claiming a bit of seasonal depression and the fact that it was just "too cold to work." All I want to do now is watch HD stuff on our brand new TV!! It's very tempting... Santa brought us a Sony Bravia W 40 inch plasma. It's NICE to say the least. I'm very impressed - Dave did his homework about what was the best quality and price for our needs. We really lucked out... We were planning on buying NO presents for each other this year, considering the weight of carrying 2 houses... but we both got bonuses from work, and some money from relatives and it totalled up to the exact price of the TV Dave wanted. Amazing coincidence.... or maybe Santa just wanted us to have something under the tree after all.