Bedtime!

 For many years we have slept on the floor (on a mattress, that is). As a bed goes, it has some advantages. It's free. It never sags. But it's hard to get out off, especially if you are pregnant. Most people would solve this problem by buying a new bed frame, or maybe a used on on Craigslist. But we are picky, wanting a bed with lots of space under it for storage, and also cheap. So we decided to trade our free time for a home-made bed.

 We bought a bunch of lumber from home depot, 2x4s, 2x6s, and some OSB. Thank goodness we have a RAV4 to cart it all home in! Then we cut it all to length, making only one mistake out of about 50 cuts.

One of the features we wanted was a headboard. We found a design we liked at Ikea and then built something similar out of 1x3s. This was the only place we cut something the wrong size. Next time you visit, see if you can figure out what we did wrong!

 

The bed has more legs than is traditional. They also serve to keep the mattress from sliding off the top. 

 

A bed needs a place to go. Our old bedroom barely held our king-sized mattress, so we decided to re-purpose Jymm's crafty room, shown here in it's former glory. Don't worry, we just moved her craft-space somewhere else.

And the final product. We decided to add a little pizzazz to the new room while we were at it, so we hung some drapes behind the bed. They serve the added purpose of dampening the acoustics in the room. We think the end result looks quite grown up. Almost like we're adults or something!

Stumped... no more!

When we toured this house, the yard was a lovely place with a beautiful shade tree in the middle. Our first act as homeowners, before we were even technically owners of the home, was to start killing that shade tree. Because there's nothing we hate more than nature!

Really, it was because the lovely shade tree had lovely roots that were making their lovely way under our lovely foundation. But that's just details.

It only took us a couple of months to chop down the tree. But then we were left with a mammoth stump in the middle of our yard just sitting there waiting for the termites to find it. So what did we do then? Dig a giant hole around the stump, of course! Who wants an attractive yard when you can have a deathtrap instead?

Long story short, after nine months of digging and hacking at the roots as they were exposed - it actually became a party game at our Memorial Day bbq!- the stump was finally cut free of it's moorings. So now we had a giant stump in a hole, with no way to get it out.

Fortunately, all that science and engineering education finally came in handy! Alan attached a giant lever, with which we could rock the stump back and forth despite our puny muscles. We then proceeded to rock and roll it, meanwhile backfilling the hole. The screws we used to attach the lever kept breaking, but otherwise things were going along smoothly.

This morning we started with the stump 2/3 of the way out, like so:

Eventually the stump was so close to the top of the hole that it seemed like we could just lever it out the rest of the way - if only the lever was in the right place. But our last screws were broken, so we were screwed. 2x4s and cement blocks allowed a different kind of levering that worked much less well, but another sweaty hour later, the stump was out. Man, that felt good - almost as good as the shower that came just minutes later.

Did we mention this whole endeavor transpired during a heat wave?

Curtains!

Finally, finally got these finished. Alan should go out of town more often!

Making a Splash

First, let me apologize for the lateness of this post...we did this project in October 2012, and are only posting about it now. We've recently decided that our blogs might be better served if we didn't insist on writing the posts together. So today you get a post by Jymm!

Above you see a lovely before picture of the backsplash behind the stove. This was a leftover piece of the old counter that the previous owner had resourcefully put in place of a backsplash. While the old counter was still there it didn't really look that bad...but once we replaced the old counter and put the tile backsplash around the rest of the kitchen it really looked out of place.

Enter: The Tile!! Notice the decorative stripe down the center made of slightly smaller tiles? That was our way of finessing the size so that we did not have to cut a single tile.

We pulled the stove out, took out the fume hood, and took out the old backsplash. Here's what it looked like once we'd torn everything out- gross!

The actual tile laying took about thirty minutes- tile really is the easiest thing I've had to do on the house. Which is pretty good because pretty soon I'll have a whole shower to tile. I imagine it will seem a lot harder once I actually have to cut the tile!

Here's what it looked like once we had all the tile laid, but before we rehung the  hood:

And finally, once we had the stove and hood back in place, here is what the final product looks like: