Archives for July 2012 | The Broken Plow

A Grayer Shade of Paint

Posted by Cassie on Jul 31, 2012 in Decor | 14 comments

Hey! We painted some walls. Ain’t that neat?

As Craig told you yesterday, my parents moved out this past weekend and that meant they vacated the master bedroom in our house and it was ready for us to move in.

But before we moved all of our stuff in, we were desperate to get the yellow-tinted walls taken care of. The best way I can describe the color that was in there before would be….butterscotch. Like the pudding. Delicious, delicious butterscotch pudding.

This color was absolutely perfect for my parents’ earthy, warm, lodge style, but we weren’t quite feeling it. As I mentioned when I showed you the moodboard for this room, we’re really looking for a cool, crisp, moody vibe in here.

To pick out the color, we pretty much broke every rule of the paint-choosing process. Not only did we not buy any samples or test out the colors in the room, but we also didn’t even really think about it too long. We walked into Lowe’s, walked up to the paint chips, picked some grays out and decided within about 90 seconds. The color we chose is Rocky Bluffs from Valspar. We had the nice paint lady color match it in two gallons Olympic Premium (because it’s no VOCs and low odor). We only ended up using about 2/3 of one gallon. Good to know. #firstimehomeownerproblems

It was important to us to get a gray that was slightly blue—because of the yellow-wood floors, we were worried anything too warm tinted would look mocha or brown on the walls. We also wanted to make sure not to go too dark. The back two bedrooms have lots of windows, but they are all covered by trees in the summer, which means there isn’t a lot a lot of natural light.

We got home, I changed out of my cowboy boots into something a little less adorable and started slapping some gray on the walls! I ~~hate~~ despise taping, so I went rogue and cut-in within a short, stubby angled brush that gave me lots of control.

After I did my cutting in, I headed to make dinner while Craig came in with a roller. The coverage with one coat was actually pretty impressive, but just to make sure we didn’t have any pudding seeping through, he went over it again a few hours later with another.

I have to be honest, when the color first went up, I thought it was entirely too blue. While I was cutting in the paint, against the butterscotch yellow, it looked so blue that it looked almost periwinkle. I need to remember that new paint almost always feels wrong when it first goes up. I mean, has anyone ever loved a color at first brush stroke?

But once it was all up, it was perfect! And now I’m totally in love. It’s so cool and crisp in there, without being overly cold or harsh. I’m really interested to see what will happen to the color in the winter when the light quality of this room changes. It’s a good thing we’re in love with the color, because we have a whole unopened can of it now. You might be seeing this gray throughout the house.

Before we loaded in our furniture, I took the opportunity to do the first step in Operation Trim Touch-Up. All around the house, the trim (especially the baseboard) is starting to yellow. Plus, the rest of the trim just has 20 years worth of wear and tear that needs a little refreshing.

There are lots of benefits to buying a house from relatives, and one of them is that they leave you an almost-full gallon of the trim paint. Thanks, Mama!

After a trip around the room with the trim white, we cleaned everything up and started to load in furniture. Including our pallet headboard.

And a recently-acquired $35 chair that Puppyface claimed almost immediately. It’s perfect for viewing out into the woods.

We loaded in our bed, a rug stolen from another bedroom and a few accessories and we suddenly had a livable bedroom!

We’re in love with the new vibe in the room. It’s almost cave-like, without being oppressive or cold. It feels so comfortable and cozy. It’s especially nice with the lamps on. Cozy, cozy, cozy! I just tossed in some red accessories to add a bit of color (without them, its a bit too neutral for our tastes) but we’ll be switching those out for purple, gold and teal accents in the future.

Oh, and in case you were wondering what’s on the other side of the room, there is an antique dresser, plus a giant awesomely gaudy mirror inherited from my grandparents. All of this is temporary. We have plans to paint the mirror frame in some bright color and use it as an accent in our guest bedroom.

While the gray has gone a long way to make this bedroom more us, we still have a ton to do in this room:

~~Make a reclaimed wood headboard.~~
~~Paint the walls.~~
Find a new (hopefully purple) rug.
Buy or make a bed. <——We aren’t too keen on the box spring look.
Buy a king size mattress.
Figure out new side tables. <——Our current ones do not work with the way the windows are placed.
Buy and hang a full-length mirror.
Replace our current side lamps with something different, possibly something installed in the headboard.
Curtains.
Change the bi-fold closet doors into French doors.
Replace the ceiling fan.
Cover up the popcorn ceiling with ceiling planks.
Figure out what to do with the sconce on the wall. Keep it? Change it out? Remove it completely?
Figure out some sort of art/design for on and above the headboard.
Add some shelves for book storage.
Hang some art, add some accessories.

Just for funsies, look at this before and after. It’s amazing what a little bit of paint can do…

Tell us about your recent paint adventures! What have you painted? How’d it turn out?

Posted by Cassie on Jul 31, 2012 in Decor | 14 comments

And The Winner Is…

Posted by Craig on Jul 30, 2012 in Lifestyle | 3 comments

First things first, I want to get right to announcing the winning title from last week’s little contest. All of your suggestions were really great, but we felt there was one that perfectly encompassed how our weekends feel. We’re pretty much non-stop and we’re constantly exhausted and completely drained, but it’s such a good kind of fatigue (most of the time). We feel accomplished. It’s as if we’ve won a hard fought battle in an ongoing homeowner and DIY war and it’s because of this that we couldn’t help but use the name “Weekend Warriors” to define it all, so thank you Nanci!

This weekend proved to be seriously taxing, both physically and emotionally, but more so the former. One thing I forgot to mention last Monday is that both Cassie and I have a three day weekend every week (Friday through Sunday), which is nice because it allows us to have that extra time to take in a little R+R when necessary and not feel completely burned out. I’m not sure we really did much of that this weekend though, since this weekend was finalizing moving her parents into their new home.

And do you know what that means?

That means after 6 months of owning this house, we finally get to live in it all by ourselves! We have complete freedom to start changing rooms and unpacking and organizing and really making this place our own. We only actually lived with Cassie’s parents for a little over a month, but we we’re seriously jonesing to personalize this place, which, as a matter of fact, took up the rest of our weekend.

Well, the beginning of the process anyways.

In an earlier post we had mentioned that the master bedroom was going to be the first space we tackled. It was only appropriate since this was the space that still felt like Cassie’s parents the most. Well, we didn’t skip a beat with getting in there and doing so. I’m not going to go into any detail, since Cassie is dedicating a post to it tomorrow, but I will tell you that it was a lot of fun and allowed us to finally get that headboard in there!

The bedroom work was actually what wrapped up our weekend, though. Leading up to it, we drove into town on both Friday and Saturday for a myriad of reasons.

Actually, let me rephrase that.

We went into town on Friday with one purpose, ended up doing something entirely different, and ended up having to go back out on Saturday to do what we were going to do on Friday because we ran out of time.

You see, after we’d finished helping Cassie’s parents move on Friday, we headed out with the intention of going to pick up paint and go grocery shopping. The only thing we actually managed to get done that we’d planned was checking out a liquor store that sells over a thousand different craft beers called The Keg Liquors. We decided while we were there that the next time we came back, we’d come with a plan to buy one local, one national and one international beer.

Image courtesy of Hoosier Beer Geek

For our first trip there, we bought some Tunnel Vision from the New Albanian Brewing Company which is about a half hour drive from us, some Alexander Keith’s, a Nova Scotia beer (brewed in St. Louis) that’s actually hard to find down here, and some Equinoxe du printemps (Spring Equinox) from the Dieu du Ciel microbrewery in Montreal. We were actually super impressed with the place. They had an awesome selection and the people who work there were very knowledgeable and really great people.

After that, when we were on our way to Lowe’s to pick up paint, we were drawn to this place with an off center, small-fonted sign whose name struck up all kinds of curiousity. According to Cassie, the building used to house a place called HQ, which I’ve since learned stood for Home Quarters Warehouse. Apparently it was a fairly successful big-box store in competition with Lowe’s and Home Depot in the late 80s/early 90s that ended up running into some financial trouble and filing for bankruptcy in the mid-90s. After that, K-Mart moved in and out and at some point, it became “Peddler’s Mall.”

With a build-up like that, how could you not be intrigued?

Am I right?

Well, in Weekend Warrior fashion, I’m going to save the details for a post later in the week, but for the time being, let me just tell you that we ended up spending 4 hours in this place, which is easily double the most time I have ever spent in any store. Also, we would have stayed longer but we were so unprepared for this place that we had no sustenance to curb our hunger.

We ended up making the half-hour drive back home, threw a homemade pizza in the oven and sat down just in time to catch the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Saturday, after we spent a couple hours at Cassie’s parents new place, we actually had to head back to Peddler’s Mall to get a mix-up fixed with an item we bought, but after that, we actually managed to get to Lowe’s to pick up some paint and paint supplies. Exciting and successful endeavour!

Next, grocery shopping led us to Meijer, where we checked out their garden center before making our way inside. We had absolutely no intention to buy anything, we just wanted to see what kind of selection they had. You may have guessed that that didn’t stop us from buying some plants. We picked up two holly, an azalea, a butterfly bush, and a crimson barberry.

See, our issue is we can’t seem to pass up a good deal and since we’re going to be redoing a garden in the near future, we figured that now was the best time to get plants to fill it with. End of season bargains and all. Now that we had paint, we wanted to get home as soon as possible to start, so we filled up our cart, paid, threw it all in the car and headed back.

With regards to the emotionally taxing portion of the weekend, here it comes.

Not too long after we got home I got a call on my cell phone from Cassie’s father. He sounded a little shook up and was asking to come over to grab a shovel. I told him it was no problem and he told me that Jada, their 8-9 year old boxer, had passed away and he needed the shovel to bury her.

It was heavy.

Jada was an incredibly sweet dog. She always got so excited to see everyone and always formed this kidney shape while fiercely trying to wag her tiny stub of a tail. Just a week ago she was running around playing and then all of a sudden she came down with a respiratory infection. The antibiotics the vet prescribed weren’t agreeing with her and she kept spitting them up and since they couldn’t do their thing, the infection spread and her heart gave out. She lived a wonderful boxer-rescued life as a part of my in-laws family and will be greatly missed.

After that, the weekend was all about laying low.

We spent the rest of Saturday and all of yesterday painting and organizing and decorating and all of that kind of fun stuff that I’m going to let Cassie tell you all about tomorrow. Later in the week I’ll share a mini-project with you that was a part of the bedroom remodel, but for now, I’ll let you get on with your Monday so you can get that much closer to Friday as quick as possible!

How was your weekend? Do you ever get sidetracked and spend 4 hours doing something you didn’t plan?

Posted by Craig on Jul 30, 2012 in Lifestyle | 3 comments

Removing the Blindfold.

Posted by Cassie on Jul 27, 2012 in Planning | 2 comments

Whenever I talk about moving into my childhood home, one of the most frequently asked questions is—are you going to change things? It’s always a silly question to me, because of course we are going to change things. That’s what happens when you buy a house. I don’t care how impeccably up-kept and decorated it is, you are going to change it and alter it to fit into your lifestyle.

I guess people assume that we’ll offend my parents if we change things. And really, that’s laughable. My parents aren’t naive people. They understand very much that the style and needs of a 20-something couple without kids is very, very different from the style and needs of a 60-something pair of grandparents. We’re cool. I promise. In fact, they’ve said on multiple ocassions that they are excited to see what we do with the space. Excited to see what a fresh set of eyes can envision.

That’s where the problem comes in. My eyes aren’t fresh. I’m struggling envisioning it.

I grew up in this house. I grew up on this land. Off and on, I spent a good 20 years of my live living here. So it’s been decidedly hard for me to see things differently. It’s like the land, layout and style are so ingrained into my mind that it’s impossible to picture anything different.

Take for example this project.

I always knew I struggled with the carport/patio issue. I didn’t like that we always sat on the carport, when, really, it should be used for cars. But I could never imagine a solution. Not because I’m a particularly uncreative person, but because that’s the way it had always been, and I couldn’t break through the crust of 20 years worth of status quo concrete wrapped around my imagination. It was like, I couldn’t see. I was totally blinded to any other possibility. It never even occurred to me that we could transform the area directly off the patio into a nice little seating area. It never even occurred to me that that simple solution could solve that problem.

But once Craig had the idea, it was like the concrete had fallen away and suddenly my imagination was unlocked. Suddenly I could see the area as something diffferent from what it had always been. It was like someone (well, Craig) took the blindfold off. Idea after idea came spewing out of my mouth and suddenly, I was looking at the space like a new homeowner instead of someone who’d lived here all of her life.

It was refreshing and exciting!

I think it’s going to take me a while to get to that same place with every element of the house and property. It’s gonna take a while to tear away the blindfold built up over the past 20 years. Thankfully, Craig doesn’t have this issue and can help me see.

Are you good at visualizing change? Can you see it before it’s done?

Posted by Cassie on Jul 27, 2012 in Planning | 2 comments

The Art of Being Canadian.

Posted by Craig on Jul 26, 2012 in DIY | 8 comments

As I’m sure most of you know already, I’m Canadian.

I hate to reach for stereotypes here, but unless you’re Canadian as well, something tells me “eh”, hockey and maple syrup are a few things that come to mind when you hear that or hear about my home land. Well, it may disappoint you to hear I rarely say “eh” and I’ve never played hockey.

Maple syrup is a whole other story though.

*queue Homer Simpson, uncontrollable, gargling drool noise*

Something else that might come to mind though is a red and black flannel jacket draped over a bearded, burly man wielding an axe.

Not to be sexist or anything.

I realize and respect that there are lumberjills as well, but the quintessential icon when it comes to the separation of tree from root is pretty much what I described, right? What I’m trying to get at here is that you probably think of lumberjacks, because forests.

You know… those things Canada is littered with?

Well here’s the thing. I felt like I had something to live up to. There was a tree on its last root on our property and it needed to be taken care of and since there’s no mob scene in Pekin, Indiana, it was looking like I had to do it myself.

Now, I could have easily picked up the chainsaw and taken care of it in a matter of minutes, but that was too simple. At the moment, that felt like the easy way out, even if it was 16” in diameter.

I wanted to get in touch with my heritage. I wanted to pretend I was Paul friggin Bunyan. I walked into the barn, I grabbed the double edge axe and the bow saw, I walked back to that tree (did I mention it was a spruce tree?), and the adventure began.

It was really less a journey back in time as much as it was a chance to compare and contrast the advancement of technology for convenience sake. It was also a chance to experience the amount of labour that goes into manually chopping down a tree and getting a work out in that didn’t mean me heading out for a run or lifting any weights.

To start, I used the bow saw to remove all of the branches that were up as high as I was tall, just so I had room to swing the axe.

I then, with the axe, began to cut a wedge into the tree on the side that I wanted it to fall.

Unfortunately, before I could get far enough into chopping a wedge out of the tree, the axe head started coming off the handle. I tried to get it back on, but that wasn’t the kind of work I wanted to do at the moment.

I decided instead that I’d just start coming at it at an angle from the backside with a bow saw, which apparently wasn’t going to cut it, pardon the pun. I didn’t get too far in before I remembered my father-in-law told me that the old-school curved handsaws that he owned were the best option.

He was correct.

Even though it still took me forever to make any progress, it worked much better than the bow saw was. So I just kept pressing through. I sawed and I sawed and I sawed, centimeter by centimeter by centimeter (OMG METRIC), and I kept taking breaks to drink water and rejuvenate my hand and take pictures of my progress and even try to push the damn thing over.

Wasn’t happening.

It seemed like I was so close. I was confused as to why this thing wouldn’t go down. It wanted to fight me and I don’t know why. It knows I’m not a fighter! It’s barbaric and unnecessary, unless it’s in a video game. Then it’s kick-ass. Avoiding the fight, I tried to whisper to it softly, reminding it that it was time to let go and I finally got to a point where I was tired of it all.

I was tired of trying to coax a tree. I was tired of cutting and attempting to chop more and risking an axe head flying off and taking out another healthy, thriving tree. I marched back over to the barn and I got a wedge and a sledge. I marched back to the tree and I slipped the wedge into where I was sawing and I started hammering away.

I ended up hammering this entire 8” wedge into the tree, increasing the size of the cut from a half centimeter to about 2 inches and still nothing. The wedge unfortunately meant that I could no longer fit the axe into where I was previously cutting, so the only choice I had was to cut away at the sides and when that didn’t seem to be doing anything, I put the saw down, placed both of my hands on the tree, and I pushed.

And it moaned, and it cracked, and it went down, prompting cheers from one side of me and applause from the other, because this took me (with a lunch break) 4 hours!

4 DAMN HOURS.

Efficient? Absolutely not! However, no one ever applauds someone for chain sawing a tree down. I worked hard and I was given credit where credit was due!

IT FELT GREAT.

I felt proud of myself for sticking with it and accomplishing it and, you know, all of that warm and fuzzy stuff that comes with working hard and it paying off.

It was all a one-time thing though, this recognition and feeling that accompanied the action of manually cutting a tree down. If I did it again, it would just be stupid of me. There’s a reason chainsaws exist. Sure, a working axe, larger, two-handled bow saw and a second person, like it used to be done, would have gone a lot faster, but I can’t imagine it was any quicker than a chainsaw.

The bottom line with this is that I got to experience something new.

Err, well, something old but new.

You know what I mean.

I had the chance to do it, get it done, and hopefully never do it again.

But hey, at least I have a great topic for a blog post, right?

What have you done the longer, harder way when you didn’t have to? How did it feel?

Posted by Craig on Jul 26, 2012 in DIY | 8 comments

Ixnay the Rest Day.

Posted by Craig on Jul 25, 2012 in DIY | 6 comments

On Sunday, I was supposed to take a day to rest up. I’d been going fairly non-stop for a few days and my muscles were a little spent and so relaxation was to be in my future. Apparently I got bored of relaxing because I ended up working on a project that took me, ohhhh, most of the day.

You see, for as long as I’ve been around the Wright family (Cassie’s maiden name is Wright, bee tee dubs) the carport has been the place to congregate on this property. Despite the fact that there is a front porch, a back deck and a deck by the pool, every morning Cassie’s parents make themselves some coffee and sit out on the carport, looking over the fishpond.

It’s their morning ritual.

(To be fair, they used to sit on the front porch, but their boxers kept destroying all of the hostas, so they changed the scenery a little.)

Also, any time family comes to visit, the cars are cleared from the carport and more chairs are brought out and a picnic table sometimes even makes an appearance. The grill also happens to call the carport home on the other side across from the sitting area. This means if you want to sit down after you check on the food, you have to walk around a car.

Hence the removal of cars.

It seemed, as the new owners of this house, we felt this needed to change. It wasn’t that it was a bad place to sit. It was serene and comfortable. It was just that the carport needed to fulfill its namesake instead of being what it wasn’t: a patio.

On Sunday, I made the decision that I’d begin the transformation. I grabbed a rake and a shovel and started to tear up some 16” patio pavers that were being used as décor around the pond and I gave them a purpose.

I built a small patio out of them.

What I didn’t do was put the effort into doing it properly. I knew that it was going to be temporary, so I just wanted to do something that allowed us to clear the carport of non-vehicular related stuff and things and return it to its former glory.

Now, normally when you’re constructing a patio, you want to clear the space, lay paver sand, level it, lay the pavers, etc. I went with something a little more rough. I started by seeing if I could strategically fit pavers into the empty voids between the existing ones.

No dice.

It was too hard to get the levels the exact same as the already existing ones and then I realized I wanted them all lower anyways, so then I figured I could at least do it one row at a time and move and reconfigure as I went.

Still, no dice.

It was just too complicated to work with existing pavers in the way of clearing dirt and rocks.

Finally, I decided to pick up and pile every paver there was so I could start from scratch.

I dug out an area that I wanted to cover with the pavers and one by one, I placed them and checked if they were “level”. I use quotations because level, for this project, is a pretty loose term. If it wasn’t to my liking or was wobbling, I threw some soil under it until I was happy with it. Then I moved along, moved along, like you know I do.

As you can see by the lighting change, somewhere along the timeline of doing all of this I took a break for some smoked beef ribs, corn on the cob and an Indycar race, which is about 3 hours of television, so this is part of why it took me most of the day. The other part is that I was really just playing around.

Ultimately, this is all a learning process and I wanted to see what I could do with the knowledge and the resources I currently had and honestly, I think I constructed a pretty nice little patio!

We decided to put out a bistro table that Cassie’s parents got us as a wedding gift and a couple chairs that they’re leaving behind.

We’ve actually already eaten there a few times and love the mood of the area so much that we’ve drawn up a plan to make the space around the pond into an outdoor entertaining area, complete with a dining table, potting bench style serving table/bar, and fire pit.

Don’t let me get ahead of myself here, though.

Let’s just sit back and enjoy it for what it is right now, shall we?

Where do you like to sit in the mornings and take it all in?