Hey, I forgot about this site

I had a few free moments this morning at work and decided to check my e-mail. When I opened up my yahoo mail, I had a lovely little message waiting for me from the Houseblog.net people. That reminded me that I had an old blog, which eventually led me back to my old friend who I regularly abandon but still waits up for me. To Fountain Square Renovation I say sorry, I have left you out in the cold, eager for the even the shortest of notes. I have a new co-author in my life who is much more literary, a wordsmith some might say. Maybe she can be a better steward than I, and I a better to the actually work at hand on the old house.

Summer in the 'Hood

What up homies! Just wanted to drop a few quick notes to let all know I am still alive despite the fact that it has been one of the most dangerous summers ever here in Indy. My area of downtown has been pretty quiet in the murder front but we always have our petty crime. As I have written about in the past, I have gone thru my fair share of heat pumps due to the scape metal prices skyrocketing. Here are some steps I have taken to prevent anyone from permentantly "borrowing" my belonging!


My Heat Pump
My Grill (Waiting to be chained to the fence)


Gotta love it!!!

Well, I just got reminded at my HS 10-year reunion that I still have this blog so I figured I would put something down. Good to hear that some people I know read this occasionally.

Peace out Gs, don't shoot me or steal from my crib. Word!

Trim Dilemma

I have also been working on getting trim for around my windows and for the baseboard. This has turned out to be one hell of a project since I can't find anything in any hardware stores that matched what is in the rest of the downstairs. As you might be able to tell my trim is pretty wide. The baseboard is about 6-8" tall and has a 45 degree cut at the top....whereas the door and window trip is about 5" wide and rounded on both sides.

Since I couldn't find anything close to a match this trim, I ended up buying poplar boards and my dad was able to use the routing tool on his Shopsmith to make the rounded edges. After some good old hand sanding to smooth it out I was able to match up the stain color to something close to my kitchen cabinet (this took buying about 10 different samples and staining a slew of strip boards till I was able to match it up enought that I was happy). I was able to get the shorter boards stained and polyurethaned with no problem. I got the longer boards stained and decided to take a day off work to polyurethane these boards. Well that day ended up being a little overcase and when the polyurethane dried it left the boards with a foggy coating as you can see below. Of course this wasn't noticeable until the boards had dried and so here I am left delaying stripping the polyurethane. Sucks, but I guess these are lessons you learn!!!!!! I have been delaying doing this for way too long and I really can't polyurethane the boards again until the weather is nice or I have room in an indoor heated area. On the top is the cloudy coating and on the bottom is a shorter board that came out correct.

Some Kitchen Pictures and Tales

Since my last post I have done a bit more to my kitchen. I went the budget route and decided to just get the countertop from Menards. I think it turned out ok.

Here is what it looks like now...

You might notice in the background on of my many closets that I have had to buy since my house doesn't have any worth a darn. I am really looking forward to getting to work on my upstairs where I can design a nice walk-in closet for my master bedroom.

I should point out my new cooking appliances that I bought for myself right after Christmas. One of my parent's exchange students that they hosted a few years ago is from Iraq and she was given political asylum here. She now has a part time job at Linens and Things so she hooked me up with the employee discount plus the Kitchaide Mixer was the display model so I got a $400 mixer for about $150. Not too shabby. Now I just need a girl who knows her role is in the kitchen to cook me dinner (just kidding ladies...you are also around to clean house, do the laundry and make babies......really I am just joking you are also around to forgive us guys when we joke about by making such sexist remarks!!!)

In addition to the mixer, I also got the waffle maker and crock pot shown above and a food processer that is not shown. Again, ten years ago I never would have believed you if you would tell me that I would be excited about buying cooking appliances.