Progress!

God Bless America. First there was progress at the Capitol with gay marriage (then not, then again), then progress in the White House with our first black President, and now progress at the Multi-Colored house in West Sac with families uniting for one common purpose: Get Shit Done!

We actually got so much accomplished this weekend that the only place I can think to start is with this:

It may not look like much, but this one picture actually shows six weekend projects that we completed this weekend.

So there is no way I could have done these weekend projects by myself. Not because they were a more-than-one-person job (some of them were), but because some of them were just things I didn't want to do (paint-scraping anyone?) that certain people in my family had the patience for (thanks Mom!). So the whole damn fam was in town to help me try to bring an end to my redecorating madness. While I'm not done yet- actually I'm nowhere near done- we were able to knock out A LOT of projects, all of which I will be showing you in the coming days.

Now you may not like the chairs, the big TV, or just my style in general, but please don't go all Glenn Beck on me and rain on my parade. This is my house, and I'll do as I please. Or do as my family pleases at least.

Eat Me: Dinner Tonight

Mmm mmm mmm. This looks like just what the doctor ordered after a long weekend of eating and drinking with the family. A light and fresh Melon Gazpacho... shouldn't be too hard to make considering my weekly Riverdog Farms produce box contained most of those ingredients! I might even sneak in some crumbled bacon on top for a treat. Mmmmm... bacon....

Welcome to California!

Ok, most of you are already here, but you're not in my California. My California is located in West Sac, in a multi-colored house, up the stairs and to the right.

Welcome to California, the Golden State:

If you look closely, you see that orange thing is in fact, not a nipple (sorry to disappoint), but the silhouette of our state Capitol. It's just one piece of the California puzzle for that room. And that sucker was quite the scientific feat, courtesy of my mother's and my inartistic sides.

I had the idea of making a headboard the shape of the dome back when I was moving into my two bedroom apartment and wanted to have my guest room be a "California" themed room. It was only appropriate considering I lived right across the street from the Capitol. Unfortunately, I have NO artistic ability, and neither did my mom who was helping me out. So we went about it in the best way we knew how: with cocktails. OK, maybe not cocktails. But I'm sure that would have made sense too. We used equations instead.

First I bought the big sheet of plywood. Then I printed out a picture of the Capitol. From there we measured the distance between each vertex and point on the silhouette (we're talking centimeters on the paper) then divided and multiplied our way to the perfect ratio scale and converted it to a measurement we could use on the sheet of plywood. After we had all the main points, it was just a matter of connecting the dots with the right lines. Then Dad stepped in with the saw and cut it for us, and we finished it up with a layer of batting, an orange velvet curtain, some serious staples and Voila! We had a Capitol shaped headboard that can also easily be mistaken for the nipple of a bottle. To-may-to/To-mah-to.

The rest of the room is a work in progress. As I've mentioned before, I'm always on the lookout for all things California. I've got some "Welcome to..." posters to commemorate some of my previous hometowns (Fres-yes) and I'm working on getting them framed. I've already got one framed beauty in there...

It's California related because he plays for California's team, right? It also matches. That Lakers Gold is one of the new colors for that room. Now you know why California is called the Golden State. You learn something new every day. You're welcome.

Eat Me: We Interrupt Your Regularly Scheduled Programming

... to bring you this!

No, that's not dessert. That's a dinner-ish Blueberry & Chipotle Pulled Chicken Sandwich. I'm sure it doesn't intrigue everyone, but that combo sounds uh-maze-ing to me! AND IT'S ON A BISCUIT(!!!). The end.

Otherwise They'd Call it (House)Play

Gah. It's only 9:00AM on a Saturday morning and I've already been up for five hours. I thought weekends were for sleeping in? Apparently not when there's work to be done. Yes work. Housework, and lots of it.

I didn't purposely wake up that early this morning (no one in their right mind would), but just happened to wake from my dinner/cocktail/dessert coma. Usually I can go back to sleep within a couple of minutes, but my mind immediately started wandering to all of the things I had to do today, and I figured I could either shut it all out and try to go back to sleep, or just wake up and get it done. And so I set to work...

First project was my office that I said I was going to tackle last week. Uh yeah, didn't happen. So I got to it this morning and made an awesome discovery: my desk! I'm actually typing it at now, something I haven't been able to do since this whole thing started. I was also able to put things in their rightful place, including on my walls.

I don't know why I thought I just had to have that gigantor calendar, maybe it was to go with my gigantor calculator.

The calculator actually came in handy after I was done tidying up. For some reason I decided now was a good time to install my kitchen cabinet hardware. All by myself. Trying to do that with help is a freakin' joke, so by myself was hysterical! Right. High-larious. A mathematical nightmare(No, seriously. This really could all be just a bad, bad, dream. It was too early for me to really be doing this, I still had to be in my coma).

When I picked out the hardware at IKEA with my parents, they thought it was so helpful that IKEA also made a template with holes in it to just put up to your cabinets so you don't have to measure 300 times on each cabinet. I thought it was great too. Until I opened it this morning and realized the template was too small for my hardware. Damn Swedes! But I wasn't going to let them leave me handle-less in my kitchen, so I decided I would measure the cabinets 300 times.

I spent a good two hours trying to figure it out, first using cardboard as a dummy cabinet to test on, and then when that didn't work the first 100 times I decided I was ready to try it on the cabinets... genius! Clearly I don't have the patience or the brain for this. One drill hole in the cabinet later in the not-exactly-right-spot, I stopped.

This is what I was left with. I have a feeling this is exactly how things will stay until next weekend when my loving, caring, handy, thank-god-I-have-them, parents come to town to help me with some projects. And so I have to get my complaining out now. All throughout the morning I found myself repeating one of my dad's favorite sayings, "That's why they call it work, otherwise they'd call it play." I hate it when he's right.

You May Say That I'm a Dreamer...

I'm not much for deep thinking (there are lights to hang and hardware to install. I do not have time for that), but as I was hanging up some art recently I realized what I put on my walls said a lot about who I am. Or I guess it's more of who I hope to be.

Save for the animal heads- I'm really not sure what those say about me- the rest of what I've been hanging up lately makes me realize I'm a dreamer. Not a dreamer like I spend all day dreaming about flying (or surviving solely on nacho cheese) although that does happen. More of a dreamer in the sense that I'm an optimist at heart and I tend to always see and hope for things that are better than reality.

I'm drawn to these things in combination with pieces that make me smile when I look at them. Like my laughing Buddha in my office:

Everyone always asks why he's in there. Why not? He seriously makes me smile every time I see him. I want to be like him: permanently smiling and letting out a hearty belly laugh. I might wear a bra though. His boobs kind of scare me.

Then there's the pretty redhead on a wall in my living room:

Now this is truly wishful thinking. I like to look at this one and pretend it's a self-portrait (I did say it was wishful thinking) with her flowing red hair and perfect posture while carelessly riding her bike through a field of flowers.

Or my newest addition, a framed marriage certificate of my great-great grandparents from 1913(!):

This awesome piece is hung by my front door. I see it every time I come in and out, or up and down the stairs. A reminder of where I came from and something for me to strive for.

Halfway up the stairs is my favorite:

This painting combined with blue wall makes me want to dive right in to whatever. To fun, to relaxing, to the weekend, to a new house. Whatever I've got going on good in my life, this painting sums up that feeling.

I didn't make a conscious decision to buy all these pieces because they make me feel a certain way. I was initially drawn to them because they're visually interesting. Then after a while of looking at them they got me thinking and dreaming... And when you come and experience them for yourself, you'll realize I'm not the only one.

A Day of Mourning

A moment of silence please....

I thought losing Chick Hearn once was bad enough, but twice is just unbearable. Chick, an apparent victim of the chaos in my house, will be sorely missed.

Chick and I go way back. He taught me everything I know about professional basketball. For instance, many of you incorrectly think too many steps in the paint is called traveling. Wrong. It's a bunny hop in the pea patch. Or how about someone jumping at a player who did a pump fake? That man just got put in the popcorn machine, and he's got butter and salt over him. Here's some easy ones: air ball, charity stripe, finger roll, brick, ticky-tack, and the description of the game "moving left to right across your dial." Those are all Chickisms-- things he taught me 82+ games a year.

When Chick passed away the first time, I continued my tradition of watching games with him by placing his permanently smiling-microphone-talking face next to my TV during the NBA season. There he sat with my husband Kobe, helping me through the good times and the bad. It's like he was still helping me through the season.

So imagine my shock when I discovered his lifeless body beneath the rubble of my desk this weekend. At first I thought he was the innocent victim of an errant bump or falling book. But wait! Upon closer inspection, I discovered the wound around his neck was too clean and the edgs were smooth... like a knife had been used. He had been murdered. Death by decapitation. And I wasn't the only one reeling from the news:

Don't let his smile fool you. Those tears are real. Kobe doesn't take breaking the law lightly, and he and I are offering a reward to anyone with a tip that leads to an arrest of the responsible party. We won't rest until the murderous (wo)man is in the fridge, with the lights out, eggs cooling, butter getting hard and the jello jiggling.

It's a Trap!

To clean or not to clean, that is the question. That seems to have been the question for the last two weeks now. The latter clearly being my preference, as evidenced by my office:

Everything is in the exact same place I put it the night the painters left and I set about putting things in their rightful place. Only not everything made it there. Sure, the big stuff is where it's supposed to be, but the small stuff is still calling my name. And I've been ignoring it.

I tell myself I'll do one thing a night during the week to get the job done. Monday night I thought I would put everything back in my kitchen cabinets. Tuesday night I was going to put everything back in my bathroom cabinets. Wednesday night the guest room was going to get organized. Thursday night I was going to scrape all of the carpet pad remnants off the floor. And Friday night I was going to organize the office. Clearly, the office job didn't happen, which means the other ones probably didn't happen either. Let me look around... Yeah, they definitely didn't happen.

During the week I find that by the time I come home from work, get ready for the gym, go to the gym, come back eat dinner, shower, and get ready for bed-- it's time for bed! Then when the weekend rolls around, the last thing I want to do is stay inside the house- what with all the food and alcohol to be consumed in my town! It's a vicious cycle really. And that cycle is where the problem lies. The longer I put things off in the beginning, the more likely I am to put it off indefinitely.

So this weekend I will desperately try to prove Admiral Akbar wrong. I'll be scraping, organizing, cleaning, touching up my way out of this trap.

Sweatin' the Small Stuff.

I thought this whole redecorating thing was supposed to be easy. OK, not easy- but easier than this!

When I first bought the house I had an idea of what I wanted to do: I knew I needed- needed- to paint the walls (does butter cream yellow strike you as my color?), paint my cabinets, replace the carpet and change out the lighting. But what I didn't have was the exact paint colors, the flooring, or any lights picked out. Those all just seemed like minor details. Right, minor.

For those of you who saw my house before the painters stormed in, you'd know how many samples I went through to find the right color. There were painted patches all over almost every wall in the house. Browns and blues downstairs, teals on the stairs, blues on the kitchen cabinets, browns on the guest bathroom cabinets, blues on the guest bathroom walls, yellows on the guest bedroom walls, and grays on the master bathroom walls and cabinets. I kept the lady at Home Depot busy with all my requests for samples (I talked to her so much about the house, I almost have the urge to invite her over to see the finished product when all is said and done). I sat with the colors on my walls for months, hemming and hawing over the best combo. Man, I hope I got it right because I can't take doing this again.

It's the same story for the flooring. I must have looked through at least 30 floor samples before finding something I liked. Carpet, tile, hardwood, laminate, engineered wood-- I looked at them all. But the problem with finding the right flooring material, was that I wanted it to compliment the colors of the walls and cabinets! If I couldn't decide on the walls, how was I supposed to decide on the floor? My head still hurts thinking about it.

After the main pieces of the walls, cabinets and floors came the finishing touches. The lighting in the house was just not doing it for me either. Dangling beads on shades on my dining room chandelier, simple recessed lighting in the kitchen, and trying-too-hard-to-be-modern-lighting in my bathrooms. None of these were my style. You'd think the smaller stuff would be easier to complete. Yet, picking out the lighting has proven to be the most difficult part of all of this. I've made the final call on the paint colors, the flooring, the decor... basically everything else but the lighting. And I think I might know why...

There are just too many choices. There are by far more lighting options than there are paint swatches in the world (it really seems like that). On top of that there are so many that I really, really, really like.

I stood at Lowe's recently looking at all these options for my bathroom. It was so stressful, like an interrogation: lights beating down on me, men in uniforms asking me if I wanted to pick one out of the line up, palms sweating, knowing that if I made the wrong decision my mistake would be staring me in the face every time I flipped the switch. But, a decision had to be made, so I pulled the trigger. I just hope I hit the target.

A Worldly Bathroom

I find it hard to type this as my little (OK, pudgy) fingers scream every time I pound the keys. I spent the better part of the day working on my downstairs bathroom. The little room off of the kitchen- Yes, there is a bathroom off of the kitchen (Rule #1, no #2!)- has been bare since the painters left. No lights, no mirror, no pretty towels. So I set about to the fixing that today, one tiny tack at a time.

I know I've professed my love of maps on here before, but I don't know if you believed me. If not, you'll see in the coming weeks just how much I meant it. Starting with today's update:

Yup. That's my (dirty) faucet with a nice assortment of worldly images behind it. Actually the whole bathroom wall is covered in the sort.

My mom and I got the idea to do this when were were visiting the East Coast and were treasure hunting with my professional-treasure-hunting-Auntie. We were in an antique store and found a stack of old National Geographic Maps. I got them on the cheap without knowing exactly what I wanted to do with them, other than they were going in my house somewhere.

My first thought was to put them above my counters as a type of back splash, but that didn't seem practical (fire anyone?), and I didn't think they were exciting enough to just display as art. That's where my genius mother (she gets it from me) came in and suggested using them as a wallpaper. From there we chose the bathroom as the location and thought the best way to do it was to casually hang them in up in no real pattern with silver tacks, like the old school ones used for bulletin boards.

The hanging process took a lot longer than I thought, and I probably should have put more thought into it, like I did with the pictures. But I didn't, and started hanging and carefully cutting around all the plumbing fixtures (and sometimes not so carefully). Four hours later, my little fingers felt like they do after putting together a large piece of furniture of IKEA that came with a million tiny little screws and dowels. Only it wasn't just the Swedish that made my fingers sore this time, it was the Russians, Greeks, Chinese, Tibetans, Kenyans, Vietnamese...

An Equation for Success

I just have to tell you all how proud I am of myself for accomplishing this here masterpiece!



This took some serious mathematical skills, which I'm not really sure I had considering Mister and I cheated our way through college math (don't tell my mom). But how hard could a little simple arithmetic be on a Saturday afternoon (after a morning of bottomless mimosas by the way)?

I knew I wanted to put various sized picture frames into this little recessed area in my living room, but wasn't quite sure how to accomplish it. I waited for The Problem Solvers (mom and dad) to come over for a weekend and put them to work mapping it out for me. Once we had the layout down I had to stock up on the frames from IKEA and then wait for the walls to be ready for this masterpiece.

But once I got started hammering in nails I realized it wasn't going to be as easy as- just hammering in nails. First I had to measure the recessed area and lay out a template on the ground to mimic it. Once I spaced out the frames as outlined by The Problem Solvers, I had to determine how much gaps I wanted around the edges. After that I started measuring and marking for the first set of frames which were the four corner ones. From there on out it was all about measuring the distances between each frame and the height and width of the remaining ones, adding, subtracting and dividing my way to perfection (thank god for iPhone calculators!).

Now all that is left is to fill the frames. If only our professor could have snapped a picture of Mister and I switching Scantrons mid-exam. Then I could be reminded of how I got to where I am. Who said cheaters never prosper?

Maybe Not the Brightest Idea

Or the lightest!

This ball of crap here is what used to be the carpet in my downstairs living room and office. For some reason I had the genius idea to get rid of it tonight (Yes, it's a Friday, which officially makes me a loser). It can't be that hard to roll it on up and out, right?

Wrong. I tried to wrap it up like a burrito (mmmm, burrito), but the burrito quickly turned into a wonky empanada (mmmm, empanada). Because I was by myself I had to shift the furniture from one side of the room to other while rolling the carpet and pad from side to side. Not the most efficient way, but I was willing to do whatever it took to get this junk out of my house.

The hidden condition of the carpet was another bomb the neighbors dropped on me after I moved. They said the previous homeowner had a large inside dog and she frequently complained about it using the entire downstairs as a giant Potty Pad. Cute! It didn't look too bad from the top, but every so often while sitting in my office the lovely smell would waft towards me... Double cute! To make it even better, when the painters came I told them I was replacing the carpet eventually and they took the liberty of using the carpet as a drop sheet. Fun!

Now my original plan to leave the carpet in until my flooring materials arrived (I ordered them online) went out the window when, but got word today that the materials won't be available to ship from Alabama until early September. Awesome! Add that to the dinge of the carpet i felt beneath my feet when I took my gym shoes off today, I knew I couldn't handle this stuff for another six weeks. So I got down and dirty, and I mean seriously dirty. If the carpet and pad fibers weren't bad enough, I think the seven years worth of dust and dirt sitting on top of the subfloor was. Clean!

The best part was trying to get that giant ball or crap through the door, off my porch, and into the back of my truck. Needless to say I got two workouts today. Thank god I know how to properly deadlift, and clean and jerk heavy shit because otherwise I'd still be out there rolling it to the city dump. Sweet!

So goes the story of the wildest Friday night I've ever had. Loser!

I Heart My Animal Head

Ever seen those bumper stickers professing the driver's love of man's best friend? The "I Love My Corgi" sticker. Only it doesn't say "Love" or "Corgi." It's usually a cartoonish heart followed by a picture of the head of a certain breed of dog. Every time I see one I can hear my dad's interpretation of it: I Heart My Dog Head.

Well, I Heart My Animal Head.

I don't know where my fascination of animal heads came from (I'm sure there's some deep, sick meaning behind it), but I do love them. Not real ones though. That's just gross. I like ones like this little antelope fellow here. I like them so much I bought two.

I had been looking for something like this for over a year now after going down to El Lay and seeing some giant steer heads painted pretty colors with the antlers dipped in gold or silver. I didn't have the $800+ to shell out on one so I set out looking for a more affordable version. I looked and looked and looked, and kept hunting around. Finally these dudes sauntered into my line of sight and I pulled the trigger and bought them. I wanted to display them as soon as I got home, but my walls weren't yet ready for their magnificence, so I set them aside waiting for my redecorating frenzy to begin. Then when the dust settled, like a proud marksman, I put those helpless suckers up for the world to see.

Whoa-oh, I'm Halfway There

Oh man that was crazy. Since the last time I posted not only was my backyard uprooted but so was the inside of my house. The painter/drywallers/framers were in and out in four days and in that time they did exactly what I wanted them to, and some of what I didn't want them to do. By the time they were done, my house was halfway to dream-housiness and I was ready for a frosty (fruity) beer (more to come on the Bev).

I'll get to sharing the progress inside the house in the coming days. I have to work up to the big reveal once the flooring is complete! Until then I'll be showing small pieces of it, leaving most to wonder what the heck I'm doing in this little place.

But first things first: my tree, or lack thereof. As big of a tree as I thought that sucker was, the tree-trimmers were done sawing, chopping, dropping, dragging and raking in about an hour. I let them in at 8AM and by the time I was heading out the door my backyard was getting a new dose of sunshine.

Sure, I miss the privacy and shade it provided, but being able to sleep without being awoken by rustling of the leaves was worth the $225 right there.

There is still a lot of work to do until I'm happy with the house both inside and out, but until then I'm living on a prayer that it will all be over sooner than later.