Blank canvas.

So here are some before and after pics of the bathroom (as promised!) after all the stripping, spackeling, and sanding. When I was taking these I realized - we pretty much have a blank canvas to work with, especially considering all the white tile too. It got me thinking... maybe I should rethink the gray color scheme? Maybe we should do a really crazy color on the walls??? Or a wild patterned shower curtain and towels??? Any suggestions? This could be fun...

Here it is de-country-fied. There's a yellow hue over everything because we took that hideous make-up light fixture out and now have to use the heat lamp bulbs as a light! (Not that I am complaining... it's been pretty chilly here lately!)

I'd forgotten about those shower doors... and those matching cutains!!! I can't even imagine where you'd find curtains that were the same pattern as the wallpaper.

So sue me.

Well I forgot to bring in the camera to work so you'll just have to wait a little longer for the before and after pics.

But Dave spackled his little heart out this weekend so the walls are ready for a nice thick coat of primer. We are getting soooo close to picking a color!! (My favorite part!)

Even though I forgot the camera... I can show you the inspiration for the bathroom. Here's a picture from the Pottery Barn website...

Ok so right now my bathroom vanity looks NOTHING like this. But! Hear me out... The top of our vanity is a fake marble looking plastic (comparable to the real marble pictured here) and all of our tile is white - like the grogeous looking tile in this picture. Soooo.... I was thinking that if I paint the bottom of the vanity brown, and paint the walls a gray similar to this... I can achieve the same sort of spa-like effect. What do you think?

Dying a slow painful death...

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate wallpaper?


(OK! ok! Stop shouting. I guess I have mentioned it once or twice....... Geez!)


Well then it should come as a shock to no one that I spent 4 (...or 5... or was it 6?) agonizing days stripping the wallpaper off of the master bathroom walls and (yes) the ceiling. If you'll be so kind as to let me lament for a minute.... I tell you it was the WORST stripping job I have ever done. In both senses of the word. As in, 1.) It was the hardest wallpaper in the entire house to get off and 2.) the walls are in the worst shape in all of the house. It was so freakin stuck on there I did gouge the walls in... umm.... several places. Dave will have quite the patch job. Much like in other places in the house, the walls are not plaster nor are they drywall - they are that weird shiny white board which we found in other wallpapered rooms. Odd. And when they get really wet they start to fall apart - making stripping wallpaper nearly impossible.


Mind you I said"nearly."




Of course I did prevail and the paper is officially OFF the walls and in the garbage can!! I then did a quick wash of all the walls and am awaiting Dave's plaster phase to be over before I can start the priming and painting. (Love you honey!! ;)
Here are some pictures from the process...


The walls came done easy enough... but when it came to the ceiling it was a different story. I have a hunch that it started to peel at one point in time and they decided to squirt some super glue in there to keep it adhered to the ceiling...


Which of course created lots of fun for me, future homeowner, 30 years later. I got to strip off teeny tiny pieces of paper, one at a time. See how fun?

Long time, No post!

Ahhh..... How I've missed you, internets!

Yes it's been a long time. No I am not going to apologize.
(What can I say? We've been busy with LIFE. It happens.)

So what's been going on at the House of Wax? Oh a little of this.... a little of that. We had a great Christmas break. Dave had to work for most of it (unlike me who had almost 2 weeks off!!! Yeah that was nice) so we didn't travel this year. It was good and bad... we missed seeing all the fam, but honestly it was NICE to not have to pack anything and be able to sleep in our own bed on Christmas Eve! Santa was good to us... he left us a brand new Refrigerator for the kitchen and a fire pit for the deck. (Amazing he was able to fit all that in his sleigh ;)

I was FINALLY able to start the master bathroom project. I spent most of my vacation stripping wallpaper... and stripping wallpaper... and stripping wallpaper. (More on the exciting details of this project later.)

And last week Dave and I hopped a plane to Vegas to celebrate my downward spiral into old age. AKA my 30th birthday. It was exactly as I imagined, totally chaotic, exciting, fun, exhausting and slightly nauseating. Which I am guessing, is also how it was 30 years ago when my mom went into labor. Although there was probably less cigarette smoke in the hospital and no slot machines...

So expect some more blogs to follow... We've got a lot of ground to cover!
Happy New Year everyone!

Fa lalalala..... lala.... la..... LA!

Dave is in heaven.

It's a little known fact that my beer loving, Simpson watching, butt scratching, manly man of a husband has a sweet spot for Christmas music.

Yup. That's right.

And I'm not talking about the updated versions of the classics (Like that awesome remake of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen by Barenaked Ladies? LOVE it!) No, Dave likes the really classic traditional renditions sung by people who are no longer alive (AKA the really SLOW ones!) It's true. As soon as we hit the day after Thanksgiving BAM! the radio was constantly set to 96.1 - Jacksonville's official Christmas music station. (I'm not sure how one applies for this title, nevertheless.....)

So here I am at work, humming Silent Night because it's been stuck in my head for days, while co-workers nervously glance sideways at me every few minutes.

What can I say! It's that time of year!

The house is decorated with all my mom's cast-offs... items she decided she no longer needed to decorate her beautiful house with. (Thanks for the really old threadbare garland circa 1975!) And this year I decided it's time to pass on these traditions. So I gave my sister a bag full of items I no longer needed (Kara! Look! Some really awesome garland circa 1975!)

What baffles me every year is the fact that Arnold still thinks that our Christmas tree is a real tree. Poor guy. He's easily fooled.

For example.... I may have told him this was a really cool hat. Although... I think he was onto me...

Santa's always watching...

What is it about the holidays that makes people start to act... well... in a word... GRUMPY?

Is it because of the terrible traffic on the road that seems to spring out of nowhere? Or is it the shopping for presents for people who are impossible to shop for? Is it the incessant family time that your mother guilt's you into? Or maybe - my personal theory - we all just miss the hot humid weather of the summer because that's why we live in Florida, dammit, we like the heat.

Whatever it is it - everyone has got it. It's like a bad cold that seems to just keep going around. No one can shake it. Everyone I know is acting like a Scrooge.

Well.

I, for one, am going to have a great holiday season - even if it kills me.

This past weekend I made Dave drag the fake tree out of storage, put it together, and plug it in to infuse some holiday cheer into the house. Granted it's not decorated yet. (What? I'm a busy girl. Shopping for impossible people to shop for.) But still... it looks pretty when all the lights are lit. And I made D drag out the ladder and throw some lights on the outside of the house. He was profusely against this endeavor, afraid it would draw more attention to the peeling paint and overgrown shrubs in the front. My theory - It's still got peeling paint, even if we DON'T put lights on it so why the hell not? It's fun. Plus the street looks so festive when everyone has a little twinkle on their house ;)

I think tonight's agenda will be pulling out all the ornaments and stockings and hanging them by the chimney with care...


WAIT.
What if I don't have a chimney? Hmm...

The week in pictures.

Ever see one of those news stories where there is no voiceover, no reporter, just nat sound and images of some event going on? Sometimes they call it "The week in pictures?" Well. Here it is. Our first Thanksgiving - in pictures. I think these say it all. I'll give you dates, purely for reference points, but as far as captions or quotes - use your imagination!! :)

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday
Friday

Saturday

IMAGE REMOVED

(for fear husband will then examine enormous credit card bill.)

Sunday

I'm just glad it's over.

I'm finally coming out of my Turkey coma. Sorry to anyone who was hanging on the edge of their seat for the next post! (You know who you are.)

The big day came and went, and I have to say it was lot like my wedding. There was alot of eating, drinking, inappropriate toasts; and I can't quite remember everything but from the pictures it looks like I had fun and everyone was happy.

Dave in a food coma...

...Arnold in his. (But Arnie's food comas seem to happen every day... hmm... I wonder if turkey is an ingrediant in catfood?)

I actually didn't do as much cooking as I thought I would have to... Thank goodness my family likes to cook!! And my in-laws brought a ton of pre-made food with them so we were all set.

The two things I DID cook were the bird (obviously) and some homemade pumpkin pie FROM SCRATCH. Ambitious, yes I know. But I like to put pressure on myself.

My friend Leanne gave me a baking pumpkin. Her dad is a farmer and she had a few she needed to pawn off on friends. I took one, along with some very loose instructions, and went on home with dreams of pumpkin pie dancing in my head.

The first step was splitting this sucker open. We briefly toyed with the idea of using the chainsaw but finally D was able to wedge a knife in there far enough to get it going. It's not quite like the pumpkins you carve at Halloween... these suckers are THICK! It's not hollow on the inside, rather it's full of "meat." And what you do is split it open, roast it for about an hour or longer, and then scoop out the meat.

Ehem... the "guns" that opened the pumpkin.

MEAT.... Mmmmmm...

And the end product. Cooked meat! Better than raw meat. Clearly.

You then take that stuff and make pumpkin pies, or pumpkin bread, or pumpkin soup..... and then more pies... and more bread...

No joke. I STILL have meat leftover and I've already made (and eaten) 4 pies and 3 bread loafs, one with nuts, one with chocolate chips. Anyone hungry?

A Range of emotions.

The saga with the stove is finally over. Let's all take a minute to sing the Hallelujah Chorus...

So how did we go from this?

To this?

For Part One of the story... I think I'll fill you in on the actual installation. The appliance guys called and said they'd be at my house sometime between 12 and 4pm on Thursday, November 20. They showed up at 3:30 (naturally). The first task was taking out the old double oven/range. They struggled with that thing for like 20 minutes... and then once they got it out realized why it took so long. It was literally stuck to the cabinets. 38 years of grease had glued it into it's little spot in the kitchen. YUCK.

While the guys were struggling to get it out the door I quickly grabbed a Mr. Clean eraser and scrubbed the cabinets so as not to have the same problem in 38 more years. (Oh yeah... and vacuumed up the dead roaches on the floor. Ick.) Then the guys came back in with the brand spankin new equipment and promptly told me they could not install the microwave above the oven because there was no outlet. Long story short, AHS would not pay for an outlet to be installed because it was a "modification"... nor would they pay for the cord needed to actually plug in the stove. (GGGrrrrr... more on the "fantastic customer service skills of AHS" later...)

So on the Sunday before Thanksgiving it took Dave all day but finally he got an outlet put in. There were all these weird supports and boards in the wall - I'm guessing that's because there used to be a doorway where the stove now resides. Remember this? We discovered the old doorway after we stripped the wallpaper in the dining room, which is adjacent to the kitchen.

So anyway we got it in, made an outlet, hoisted the micro up, got that in, and painted the wall (or plywood in our case) (What? Totally normal wall material, right?) and Voila! Now we're cookin!

I love the new stove - and am really enjoying that glass top. It's just sad that it took 5 months of aggravation and government intervention (The BBB rocks!) to get AHS to honor their commitment to us. We had originally called AHS on July 7 to come out and fix the broken burner on the stove. They came out, diagnosed it and said we'll be back in a week to replace it. Well here we are in November. I'd say on average I spent about 4 days per week on the phone with them - either on hold, or talking to someone who knew "nothing about my ticket. Can you hold while I pull up your information?" Totally aggravating. Yes. Was I going to let them win? Never.

A sample of "my life on hold" for the past 5 months:

What seems to be the problem?

(SIGH) I have a broken stove and am waiting on the new part. I'm just wondering what's taking so long because I'd really like to start using my stove again.

Let me pull up your file.

click click click click click. click.

pause.

click click click click click BIG CLICK. MAYBE AN ENTER KEY?

Pause.

Hmm. Well. It looks like we are waiting on a part.

Right. I just told you that. How long before it comes in?

5 to 7 business days.

You told me that 5 to 7 days ago.

Actually I did not ma'am. This is the first time I've seen your file.

Well someone from your company then. Actually - someone from your company has been telling me to wait 5 to 7 days for about 2/3/4/5 months now.

Hmm... that is a unusually long time. Usually we are out there within the week. Hold on while I... click click click... Let me just pull up.... click click click click click click click. Hmm. Well it said the part was ordered and delivered.

But it obviously wasn't. Because I still have a broken stove. Can I speak to your manager?

None are available right now.

Ok I'll hold.

No I'm sorry. We don't allow our customers to hold for a manager.

Wait - You're kidding right?? I can hold for 47 minutes to get YOU on the phone, but I can't hold for a manager. Why is that? This is ridiculous. Can I leave a message at least?

No I'm sorry. You have to leave your phone number and a manager will call you back.

So phone calls like this went on for weeks. The conversations always absurd... No one ever calling me back. I always ALWAYS had to make the call first. But we finally did find out what actually happened to that mystery part. AHS did order it, it got sent to Jacksonville Appliance and Electric, but they used it in someone else's home. (Aside from the fact that they are obviously a shady company - how about the fact that someone else in Jacksonville has this relic of a stove and needs the same exact fix!!??!!) So AHS's recommended solution was to re-order the same part, using the same company and go through the whole rig-a-ma-rue again.

Well I said nuts to that and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. FINALLY I got the customer service I'd been fighting for. But it was a long time coming.

I learned some very valuable lessons from this whole experience.

1.) The BBB is an awesome outfit and will totally fight for the little man.

2.) I have the ability to sit on hold for a very long time... and even start to enjoy the muzak.

and 3.) American Home Shield is an awful AWFUL company and if you have a friend or loved one thinking about using them as their home warranty company - send them this blog and then barricade their checkbook!! Do not let them waste one penny on this company!!

OMG It's almost Turkey Day!!!!

Looking at the last post, I almost shed a tear (sniff sniff) I was SO HOPEFUL that we could get something accomplished before the big day, but alas here we are... November 17th and I have NOTHING NEW TO REPORT.

I know.

It's quite the shock... but I think we were just worn out from the Rays almost winning the world series, the Gator games and Jags games, and don't forget about those pesky elections that kept Dave at the office until 2:36 AM. (News sucks.)

So we've done some minor - itsy bitsy teeny weeny - things around the house, but nothing really spectacular where you'd say - Wow what a difference!
Instead I am focusing my efforts on NOT FREAKING OUT over the fact that we are almost 1 week away from hosting our first Thanksgiving. (See how well I'm doing?)