it's been over a year

I feel like I should start with my usual... "I'm really bad at updating this blog." Since my last post I...

• quit my job
• got a new (better!) job
• bought a house
• moved
• got married

We moved to NH last September - for me, I'm in the next town over from where I grew up so its a very familiar area. For Ryan, he's always lived in the same town in MA (we lived there after we graduated from school) so NH was somewhat new to him aside from the visits to my parents house.

We're still slowly unpacking - I think the only thing we (I) really have left to unpack is my sewing stuff. We're painting every room in the house so we didn't want to unpack everything and then have to move it out of the way to paint. The office/sewing room has been completely painted, so I really just need to set aside time to get in there and organize everything. I've been wanting to sew something (anything) so as the urge gets stronger, I'll get everything unpacked.

The new house!

While we were in the house-buying and moving process, we were also planning/getting ready for our wedding. We got married at Sugarbush Ski Resort in Warren, VT. So now Ryan's really stuck with me. :P

We did what we could for the wedding - we made centerpieces, my mom whipped up the table runners for me, I bought all the candles that went on the tables, did the table numbers, the guest Mad Libs sheets, the card box, the favors, the decor we placed around the room, my mom made the cake... We had an amazing photographer, Caroline (www.birkephoto.com) and an amazing florist, Randi (www.silvertoad.com) to help us with those details that we couldn't do on our own. We kept the guest list small and limited it to mostly family and close friends. We had a great time and it seemed like everyone else did too. :)

woo hoo! sewing room has been relocated! :)

Previous sewing room location: basement.

New location: what used to be the office (on the first floor!).

I love the new location. A few more pictures can be found here.

One of the cutting tables had to stay downstairs and as a result, I had to downsize on the size cutting mat I can use (unless I put the ginormous one on the dining room table). But everything else fit rather well into the room. I would have made it work no matter what - I wanted a first floor room!

After the new pictures were taken, we took a trip to Ikea to find some suitable chairs/stools. My desk is bar-height and I wanted something ~18" tall for the sewing table.

Desk chair:

... and stool for the sewing table (before & after):

Ikea really wanted me to buy one of their covers since the stool already came with the foam & interfacing-type covering stapled to it. It also already had the scratchy side of velcro on the undersides... I knew I could pull something out of my stash to make a cover so that's what I did.

The current work-in-progress:

Which will be Simplicity 2648 when it's done.

I have high hopes for this pattern since its got different fits - different bust sizes and different hip shapes (slim, average, curvy). Mine will be black - I had the cloth in my stash for a looong time so I have no idea what it really is or where it came from. It's kind of like a heavyweight linen, if that makes sense.

And one more work-in-progress:

We also picked up one of these benches at Ikea to go at the end of our bed. We know we (and by we, I really mean me) want to cover the top. The Mr. didn't think two layers of quilt batting was enough of a cushion for his cute little bottom, so at some point I have to go to Jo-Anns and get some foam. And figure out what I'm going to cover it with...

I'm horrible at updating this.

Quickly since the last update:
1. sold my new sewing machine - didn't like it. especially the reverse button.
2. old trustworthy machine is broken - need to take it somewhere to be serviced.
3. got engaged... officially, I guess. the jerk bought me a ring too - even though I told him not to :P
4. we're trying to move up to the Burlington, VT area. right now we're applying for jobs without too much luck... well, I'm not having too much luck. Ryan pretty much has a job once the employer has more money roll in with some anticipated contracts.

ok, and now since I'm bored:

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings-JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series- J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations-Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Ubervilles-Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner-Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi-Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities-Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones- Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (though I'm not sure if it was the abridged version or not)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno - Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I read the French version!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down -Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

more lights!

Every time I turn on the lights for my sewing area, I still think this looks a little weird - having recessed lighting plus pendant lamps. Especially where the pendants over my cutting table are kinda close to the recessed lights.

Oh well. It works.

What I'd Rather Be Doing

What I'd rather be doing than sitting at my desk:

• setting up my new tables in my sewing room
• reading my book
• sewing
• buried under the blankets in bed watching a movie
• scanning old pictures

We went to Ikea last night. The intention was to get tables/desks. For the basement. Ryan wanted a table/desk primarily for soldering stuff. He's been playing around with electronics lately... for the grill. The desk in the office is too small and gets too cluttered if he tries to work up there. We still have an unused corner of the basement, so he wanted a table/desk to put down there so he wouldn't have to play mad scientist in the office.

Okay, so that's table/desk #1.

I kind of had an idea that I should get another table for my sewing area to use under my cutting mat. The problem is that my cutting mat is huge. I love it, but it doesn't fit on the table that I had which is now home to my sewing machine and eventually my serger once I move it over there. I was eyeing the Ikea dining room table that is the same style as the sewing machine table and my (custom!) ironing board. But then as we went through the desk/office area, I found a table that was on sale... if I bought 2 of those tables it would a) be cheaper than the dining room table I looked at and b) be larger than the dining room table I looked at. I'm hoping the cutting mat will fit on it. If not, then I'll use one of these tables for the sewing machines, and use the older table for the cutting mat again. Why is it so difficult to find appropriately-sized sewing room furniture? :P

So there's table/desk #2 and #3.

THEN as we went through the bedroom section, we start looking at bed frames. We totally did not go in there to look at bedroom stuff, but you know how Ikea is. You have to look at everything. Right now, with the frame we're currently using, the bed shakes if someone rolls over or gets out of bed. It shakes a lot. It bothers me more than it bothers Ryan, but I think he was getting tired of hearing me complain about it, so we ended up getting a new bed frame. This new one should be a lot sturdier than the one we're using, plus it'll allow the mattress to be lower (we won't have to use the box springs anymore). Aaaand it'll fit under the window. Right now the top of the frame is above the window sill, so the sill is getting a little beat up.

Everything is still in the boxes, sitting on our dining room floor.... which eventually I'd like to get a new dining room table too, but that'll have to wait. :)


My stupid foot is doing well. 3 1/2 weeks after surgery, I went for an xray. I expected to have another cast put on after the xrays were taken, but my doctor walked into the exam room and said, "Well, it's been less than 4 weeks... but you're completely healed already. I don't know how but I'm not going to torture you by putting another cast on." Yay! So she kept the back half of the cast on, wrapped it in an ace bandage, and then sent me on my way (back) home to get my clonky velcro boot. I can already walk around the house fairly well without the boot, but to make sure my doctor will still be happy, I'm wearing it whenever I leave the house.

busy busy little bee

We've set a date for our housewarming/belated graduation/belated birthday party. So now we need to make sure the house is actually finished. But this means the other half of the basement ceiling will be finished (i.e. I'll finally have real lights over my sewing area).

My "little" brother turned 16 last week. "Little" because although he is younger than me, he now outweighs me and is taller than me.

My Pepére has been in the hospital and things aren't looking too good - he was read his last rights on Sunday. Right now I'm indifferent about the whole thing, but that's another story.

I didn't get a job I interviewed for back in March. The only part that sucks about not getting it is now I have to start looking again and start interviewing again. I hate interviewing with a passion. I just freeze up if they ask me those stupid typical HR questions. Even though I know they're gonna ask them in 97% of the interviews. I just can't do it. I'd rather sit there and have a conversation like a normal human being.

Oh and if anyone is feeling extra generous today, I'd like one of these, please:

our house

I suppose if we're going to have a housewarming this summer, we should pick a date now to make sure people know about it. But I wanted to show anyone who actually reads this blog what we did to get our swanky house.

Back story: Ryan's Great Uncle Roger is 97 (or 98?) years old and lives in an assisted living house. Roger and his wife, Ellen used to live in the house we now live in. Roger knew that unfortunately he would not be returning to the house and so he told Ryan that he could move in and live there if he wanted to.

And so we did.

But not before doing some major work to it.

Before we even touched the house, we had it tested for mold (I got wicked sick the fall before we started work due to the mold in the house). Yup, there was lots o mold in there.

So, there were a couple 5 dumpsters. I think 5 is the right number. And we're talking 30-yard dumpsters. The first couple were just to get rid of the stuff that was in the house. When Roger went to assisted living, he didn't take anything with him really so there was all his furniture, a full kitchen, and closets full of clothes to take care of.

After we got rid of almost everything that was in the house, then came the demolition/mold remediation. The crew we hired to do the mold remediation were also going to do most of the demolition for us because it was easier for them that way.

Here are some pre-demo pictures:

Laundry room.

The kitchen. Through the arch is the living room/dining room. The hallway (to the right) leads to the main bathroom and the bedroom.

Another shot of the kitchen. Lovely, no?

The living room... with the lurvely wall mural.

The main bathroom (there was also a 1/2 bath off the kitchen). Seafoam green and pink, baby. Pink sink, pink toilet, pink cast iron bathtub. That bathtub weighed a ton.

The basement. One biiiiig, empty, green room.

Before we did anything to the outside.

Now when I say that we completely renovated this place, I mean it:

This is me standing in the kitchen. The window you can see in the background is the other end of the house. There used to be a full staircase going up to the attic somewhere in between me and that window.

The new kitchen cabinets and sink. (Blue Corian countertops, custom-made maple cabinets).

Master bath cabinet & sink unit. Custom cabinets done by the same place as the kitchen cabinets. White Corian countertop/sink.

Finished basement. Dark blue/gray-ish walls, berber rug. I did the majority of the framing down here. *pats self on the back*

Living room/dining room area after the paint & floors are done. Floors are cherry (real wood).

Dining room area. We did a chair rail to make that area a little more formal. Top of the wall is a light tan - same as the living room and office. Bottom half of the wall below the chair rail is a dark blue.

Here are two pictures that were taken from the same spot. It really shows how much we opened the house up - we eliminated the little archway going into the rest of the house. We also eliminated the hallway that ran down the middle. The wall you see a chair resting against is gone - that was part of the stairway going up to the attic, but since we didn't see the point in having a full staircase going up there, we took out that whole wall. Right now there is still basically just a hole where the stairs are going down to the basement, but we are planning on putting in a railing at some point.

When we first started this project, the contractor we had for mold remediation thought we were crazy. We started in March and we told him we were going to be moved in by June 1st.

And we were. Earlier than June 1st, acutally.

I think we were crazy. Ryan was finishing up senior year, I was working full time + being a full time student + going to roller derby practices. Yikes.

Writing this has made me realize I should take pictures of the house now because we've finished up a lot more and actually have some furniture too. ;)

springtime!

I love when everything outside starts budding and blooming. :)