Hello… again!

Hello. It’s me. I was wondering after all these years you’d like to… read another post.

Alright so it’s only been a year and a half. Excuse: The job that I now work at actually requires me to do legitimate work things between the hours of 8:30 am and 5:30-ish pm, unlike my previous place of employment where I had spare time every day to… you know… write blog posts… Plus there really hasn’t been a whole lot worth rambling about.

But boy do I have some humdinger updates!

After pining over wanting to move for like, the past 5 years, we’re finally eyeball deep in moving. Unfortunately, it’s a bittersweet tale… my grandmother passed away in April 2017, and my family wanted to keep her 117 year old farmhouse in the family. It’s the only house my mom can remember living in (they moved there when she was a baby) and it’s where my family has had Christmas every year since the 1950’s. My sisters and I and my oldest niece were all brought home from the hospital to that house. We all got off the bus at the end of the school day there… Needless to say the house is a huge deal to our family.

But my mother and sisters own houses right next door, so it’s not exactly as if they could just pack it in, sell their houses and move into grandma’s. So after my mom and my aunt finally settled the estate in April 2018, Travis and I rented a moving truck… and moved! Sort of.

Sort of meaning… we’re still in limbo between the two houses… mostly still in our house in Columbus. Travis is currently prepping that house for putting it up for sale in June. Bless his heart, there’s not much I can do to help him (I’ll get to that in a minute) so he’s doing it all by himself. 😦

So far he’s power washed every exterior surface (including our fence, which looks BRAND SPANKIN’ NEW now!!), installed new glass block basement windows, shampooed all the carpets, fixed a saggy countertop, painted EVERY room, repaired a wall we had to demo to fit our refrigerator in, repaired an outside faucet (for $3 – that a local plumber wanted to charge us $900 for)… and he still has to:

• build a closet in our master bedroom
• touch-up paint the interior doors
• install a new storm door
• fix a leaky bathroom faucet
• paint the exterior foundation
• paint our porch floor
• paint two sides of our house where we accidentally power washed the paint off 😦
• trim some trees in our back yard
• patch a few holes in the shed
• mulch and plant flowers in our flower bed

Needless to say, it’s going to be a super busy few weeks getting the last of these things whipped out by the beginning of June, which BTW is the best time to put your house on the market. According to my newly licensed Realtor husband! ❤

And to top all that fun off, the reason I am not helpful at all is… we’re expecting a little boy in September 2018!

We are super stoked! My mom’s side of the family has not had a boy in 5+ generations. As one of my mom’s friends said, this kid is going to be “hen-pecked”! He will be immensely spoiled and dearly loved. And the fact that my son will grow up two houses down from the house where I grew up, running barefoot in the same bean field back and forth between all of our family’s houses like I did is absolutely awesome.

We have a LOT on our plates with this big farm house… We’re not sure yet what all we’ll be doing until we have a budget figured out. We know that while my sweet grandma’s bows and ruffles wallpaper were charming for her, we’re pretty sure that is not our style. There’s also a bathroom with floor-to-ceiling bubblegum pink ceramic tile (complete with matching pink sink and toilet…), a kitchen that hasn’t been touched since I think the 70’s… BUT there is original wood flooring under that 26-year-old wall-to-wall blue carpet which we’re hoping is in good shape so we can refurbish them! Carpet + kids + dogs + cats + all of the feet = Gag!

The only thing that this farmhouse is missing is a big front porch where we can sit on a swing and drink iced tea and watch the world go by. Which we’re really hoping we can add one day!

PLUS I’m a history nerd, and I cannot wait to find out the history of the house! Rumor has it that the folks who built the farm house back in 1901 were pretty well-to-do and that all of the lumber used in the house was actually milled from the woods on the property! I’m really hoping someone in the county will be able to point me in the right direction and dig up some juicy details about the house!

We can’t wait to dig into all of that stuff but I’m not going to lie, the massive amount of work it is going to take over the next heaven-knows-how-long, on top of keeping up with the little Tasmanian devil that I’m sure will be my husband’s child, is terrifyingly daunting.

I’m really hoping I can keep up with all of the stuff going on and get it blogged here so we can look back on it eventually and smile! I’ve kept up (or tried to) with this blog this long because we really have had fun looking back at all our fun memories. People don’t take home videos any more and we don’t print out of pictures to hang up and look at. One of my friends told me that their kids don’t even pass out signed school photos anymore. What?! What are they drawing devil horns on now when they’re mad at their friends?!

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How to Build a Halloween Mausoleum!

So it may have been years in the making, but we finally did it… We finished our mausoleum for our yard!

We planned on this being a multi-part project and thought we’d just “slap it together” and just live with it this year, but we were both really pleased with how it came out, we don’t think it needs a whole lot more. Maybe we’ll add some architectural details/interest, and I thought about moss and more aging.

Here’s the run-down of how we did it!

We started the process by using this drawing as a a loose reference for the general shape of our mausoleum.

Travis did a ton of research online about how to actually go about building it and scoped out some other folks’ projects to get an overall generalization of what materials to use.

Then he took a trip to Team Blue (Lowe’s) and bought ten 2×2’s and four sheets of plywood. The guys at the store did some of the rough cutting for him, but since we were really just wingin’ it, most of the cutting got done at home.

This is Travis’ quick explanation of how he built it:

1. I figured out the size that I wanted it to be – each wall is 4ft long and 5ft tall
2. Cut the plywood into the correct sizes (measure twice, cut once!)
3. Cut the 2x2s to the right length in order to make the frame
4. I made 3 walls, then screwed them together
5. Then I made two 1ft long by 5ft tall pieces to create the two front walls, which gave me the 2ft wide doorway
6. For the roof, I used two 4ft by 3ft pieces and framed those as well to create the peak

Once the whole thing was built, we put on 2 coats of exterior paint.

For the arch over the doorway, we re-purposed our homemade “whacky boat” we made this summer for our family’s lake house regatta. (Thats that huge pink surf board looking thing behind Travis, above.) Which are in fact pieces of foam insulation board. The same goes for the “belt” piece around the middle. That part will eventually be painted to look like stones. The little ledges to the left and right of the doorway are made of scrap 2x2s.

To cover up the lines and darken up the inside to make our white ghost stand out, Travis used some horrible red paint that The Others left behind when they moved. It was actually the color of our 6 ft by 4ft bathroom when we moved in. Sexy.

I then mixed up a small batch of grey paint; I used white paint exterior with a tiny bit of black paint, then I thinned it out with several cups of water to make it about the consistency of thick watercolor paint. (I’d say the final mix was probably 2 cups of paint to 5 cups water, but that’s a rough estimate. I lost count, I just added water until I got the consistency I wanted.)

We used a cut up tshirt to color-wash the exterior. We used several different “techniques” like wiping and dabbing to create a cement-ish texture. I’ve heard of people using grocery bags to achieve a similar look, but I thought that would take too long. The tshirt really soaked up a lot of paint and kept me from having to reload it over and over.

Once the whole thing looked like concrete, I went it with varying shades of black and grey paint and dry-brushed in the aging, to make the whole thing look like concrete or stone does after it’s aged for decades. To dry brush, you literally use a dry paint brush to apply the color in very thin layers.

I started out with black along the edges and where I wanted serious aging “shadowing” and then went back in with some of the color-wash and applied that on top and just blended it in towards the center of each panel. Travis helped me with the bottom, once he got the hang of it, he really did a great job and he considers himself to be “very not artistic.”

I used a small paintbrush to add in cracks and paint in the spots above the ledges to make them look recessed into the stone. We’ll eventually add some sort of candle or torch there. We mounted a skull above the door that we had from another Halloween decoration that we didn’t use. You could put just about anything there… we thought the skull was pretty cool!

THEN came the fun part. We had to get this puppy through our 3 ft wide gate! Finished, it is 4ft wide by 7ft tall. We ended up having to remove the roof and carry it through in two parts, that was easier than we anticipated.

Once we had it set up where we wanted it in the yard, we hung our Lady in White inside. We have read all sorts of blogs that have animatronics that people have custom-built themselves and they look really great… But we priced out the parts needed to make her from scratch and we decided that buying this one from Spirit was far cheaper and worth it for us. Her arms move up and down! Maybe someday we’ll custom-make something to go in there, but this lovely lady seems to be working out super.

We initially wanted to do a name placard over the doorway, but we couldn’t agree on a name to give her. We Googled all sorts of famous ghost stories of ladies in white and couldn’t come to an agreement on one we thought was fitting. So we’ll come up with our own… But it’s gotta be good, and these things take time.

And what mausoleum is complete without the perfect ambient lighting?! So we purchased these Fire & Ice LED spotlights. One in green and one in blue. They each have motors on the inside that spin the internal light source through the diamond-cut dome, which makes the lights sort of shimmer. The best way to describe it is when light reflects off of water onto a surface.

The green one shines onto the front of the mausoleum, and we mounted the blue one on the interior, pointed downward onto the Lady. It gives it a sort of spectral, misty look. It looks almost like a really bright black light on her white dress.

And this is what the finished product looks like… Drumroll please….

And it blends in nicely with the rest of the graveyard, which is not quite done yet. We have a lot of items still to be put out. Plus on Trick or Treat night, we put in fog machines. But it is also lit up in blue and green to give it that sort of swampy-bayou feel!

All in all, we spent about $60 to build the mausoleum. Which doesn’t factor in that we had a coupon and two leftover gift cards from a return we made previously!

• Plywood
• 2x2s
• 2 inch screws
• 1 quart of white paint
• 1 quart of black paint
• 1 gallon of fence paint (already had)
• 1 sheet of foam insulation (already had)
• 1 gallon red paint (already had)

Then we bought the other items at Spirit, but also had a 30% off coupon for those, so we spent well under $100 on:

• Ghost lady
• Green Spotlight (already on sale!)
• Blue Spotlight (already on sale!)

It took Travis probably 2 hours to build it. The painting took probably 3 hours over the course of 3 evenings after work. This is something that could easily be done in much less time, but we kind of took our sweet time.

It’s been up for about a week now and so far so good! We’ve even had some rain and everything seems to be holding up really well. The fact that we used fence paint meant for some hard-core elements is probably it’s saving grace. We made sure to get the paint on really thick and into all the nooks and crannies that will be exposed. After this season, it probably wouldn’t be too crazy of an idea to put some sort of sealant on it and even get into the interior and paint every inch of it. Considering the inside  is just latex interior paint, it probably wouldn’t hold up long-term without a sealant. But for the couple weeks it will be in the yard this year, hopefully it will hold up nicely.

Well there you have it! Happy Halloweening!

Happy House Anniversary!

Happy July 1st! And Happy House Anniversary to us! 8 momentous years ago, we took possession of Casa De Awesomesauce. We were 23 years old!

It’s also by far, the longest my husband has lived in the same place! Ha! My small-town ways have rubbed off on his gypsy soul! Plus, moving sucks real bad!

We went to a concert that evening and afterwards were supposed to stay the first night in our first home, but when we stopped at the house, the previous occupants were still moving stuff! The place was mostly empty, but every light in the house was on… jerks.

We waited three more days for them to get out. It was the longest wait of our lives! Even after we moved in, they spent two more weeks coming back and forth to get their shit out of our yard and shed. Trampolines, pool, play houses… we probably should have made a stink about it, but that wasn’t going to accomplish anything.

On another note, I have some sad news, folks…

After doing some serious inspecting of the Hell on Wheels camper, we realized the damage is far more extensive than originally anticipated. There is more water damage than we can afford to fix. We’d normally just say whatever and haul it out to our favorite boondocking spot as-is, until it completely falls apart since we don’t really dig campground camping, but we no longer have access to that property where our spot is. 😦 So since it would be really silly to put money into something we’ll never get a return out of, we’re throwing in the towel.

We hate to be quitters, but this project just doesn’t make any sense for us anymore. After the nightmare that the boat became, (read about that here and here!) we just don’t want this camper to be a repeat of that. We found a charity that will come and haul it away for free, let us write it off for taxes like you would when donating items to a thrift store, and give they’ll give us a voucher for 2 free nights at a bunch of cool destinations across the US. So we’ve decided to do that and focus our time and energy on the house instead. Because you know what? We’re taking the first steps towards moving.

We’re not sure exactly where to, yet but we know we’re over the ‘burbs. Even though we still love our Columbus with the fire of a thousand suns! We love the convenience of it and the fact that we can find something to do virtually 24 hours a day. We love the culture and that it is a community of acceptance and understanding for everyone.

But I also miss the peace of living in the country, it fits too.

So in the meantime, we’re going to start slowly polishing up the house. For instance, we haven’t had electricity in over half of our kitchen since the year we moved in… 8 years ago. Things like that are probably important to future potential home buyers! So we’ll be begrudgingly hiring an electrician to come out and take a look at it since it’s not one of the things we feel comfortable tackling… Because we’d probably kill ourselves.

So to get that whole laundry list of things rolling, over the last month we got started with our spare bedroom. Yeah, kind of a weird place to start, but it was the place that really needed the most help. It had hideous, dirty, stained,  mauve carpet, green paint on the walls (that we slapped up in an hour to cover the vomitous pink paint and ballerina border leftover from the previous occupants) plus we had somehow managed to smear it all over the ceiling. It was one of our first paint jobs, give us a break!

This might be your cup of tea, but pink carpet with pink walls with pink ballerinas wasn’t really our thing! And like I said before it was suuuuper stained. Kids + dogs + carpet = Gross.

I could just slap myself for not getting more “before” photos. But we snapped ONE while things were in progress, where the two greens met (the bottom green was theirs, our darker green that covered the pink was on top) there was a piece of foam chair rail with little cutesy daisies on it. It was cute from afar, but upon close inspection, it was very juvenile looking. Plus we were over it. So it got ripped down.

We initially planned on painting the subfloor while we waited for the cash to put in new flooring. Sounds scary, but some folks have really done some awesome things with their subfloors!

Like this! This looks awesome! It’s not a long-term plan, but looks way better than kid and dog stained pink carpet!

But then we ripped up the carpet and found laminate parquet flooring underneath! Initially I was thrilled, so now I could just paint the floor a sweet putty color and call it done! But upon taking a good look at the floor we realized how bad of shape it really was in. There were tiles that were cracked and broken. It was just a mess.

Then I remembered we had just bought all that bomb-ass peel & stick vinyl planking for the camper! Bingo!

Before we got started, we used a 5 gallon bucket with 1/2 cup Mrs. Meyer’s Multi-Surface concentrated cleaning solution to scrub the floors. Vinegar would work too, but I love Mrs. Meyer’s!

Soap Box Alert: I freaking love all of Mrs. Meyer’s earth-friendly products and they are now what I use exclusively in my house. Laundry soap, dish detergent, dish soap, everything. They work amazing and smell wonderful. Basil and Lavender are my faves! Grab some at the grocery store next time or order yourself a gift bucket online. This stuff is amazing! I know it’s a little granola-crunching, but I really do care about what our home dumps back into the world. With all of the water problems we’ve been experiencing in Ohio over the last few years, it makes me feel better knowing I’m doing my best not to contribute to that.

Then we just spent an hour or two a night after work peeling and sticking those puppies down! I was really concerned at first about the peel & stick quality. We had used peel & stick once before in a family member’s bathroom and it ended up having to be redone later. This wasn’t really something we were interested in doing. But after we read a lot of reviews about it, we decided this brand had some serious sticky stuff and took a chance! So far, 3 weeks later we’re still really happy. There are a few spots that sort of lift a little bit, but we’re chalking that up to the crappy floor underneath. And if it continues to be an issue, we’ll just grab some sort of adhesive like Liquid Nails and re-peel and stick those suckers back down.

It was a lot of work, but it was easy work. They scored very easily with a knife and then could be snapped by hand to the sizes that we needed. By the time it was all said and done, we were definitely sore for a few days, but we were SUPER happy with the results!

Then after the floor was installed, it took a few more days of rolling around on the floor to measure, cut, paint and install quarter-round throughout the room. My mom had gave us her old air compressor with a brad gun. This was the first time we’d used the gun, and it was a LIFE SAVER. We had the quarter-round nailed down in about 10 minutes!

Here’s the semi-finished product! We still need a headboard and have since got a chest of drawers which we put on the wall at the foot of the bed, but it was a nice starting place and hopefully some fuel to finish up some of the other rooms in the house!

Mainly the master bedroom. Which we’ve been saying we were going to tackle for 8 years now. Blargh!

Well, Happy JULY and to Happy early birthday, ‘Merica! And until next time, stay classy!

Like a Bat Out of Hell

March just flew past like a bat out of hell! No… not like the Meat Loaf song.

March was crammed full of massive momentous occasions. I loaded up like Ted Nugent on a safari and went out to the hillbilly range at our friend Edd’s and managed to somewhat overcome my skepticism of loaded weapons. Not only did I get over it, I kind of liked it. I still couldn’t shoot a living thing, but I don’t want to pistol whip gun nuts as much. I ended up collecting a somewhat large pile of brass by the end of the day. I even got to fire my friend’s monster 44 magnum. It was a hand cannon, but not as scary as my husband’s pistol grip shot gun, which actually made several of the dudes shake their hands out after firing it!

I’m still skeptical of 98% of people’s capability to handle and operate a loaded weapon.

And I already posted about getting my first dirt bike and riding it for the first time. Also riding my husbands motorcycle for the first time.

In March, I also celebrated the purchase of my first motorcycle! Though, I have yet to ride it, since Ohio’s springs leave much to be desired by way of the lack of dry roads. I don’t really feel like eating pavement my first time in the seat. 😦

We also mentioned that we managed to finally haul our camper Hell on Wheels home. We had to back her in our driveway at 11pm on a Sunday night.*

*Warning! The next few paragraphs contain my rant about inconsiderate neighbors! I try to keep things here as up-beat as possible, so my apologies for the negativity that follows…

However, since we live on a very small street where the neighbor across the street is kind enough to have four of his unused vehicles parked right across from our driveway, we had to drive through the yard (ugh!) while our seriously awesome next-door neighbor watched from his window while grinding his teeth. Not at us, but because we had to do that, since the guy across the street apparently is running a used car lot. (They have 7 vehicles total. Only 3 people live there, which includes the 40+ year old no-job-having son.)

Above is a map to illustrate how we got a 27 foot camper into our driveway. Our house is the one with the yellow star. The used car lot automobiles are the blue ones marked 1-7. Note that 5 is in the driveway and 6 and 7 are actually in the garage! They only operate 6 and 5 on a daily basis. The grey cars are my car (left) and the awesome neighbor’s (right).

This would be the same neighbor who came running out of his house last summer when I parked in front of his house (city streets here = public parking) after I had worked a 11 hour day, then made my 1 hour commute home, yelling at me to move my car because “that’s where his son (yes, the one without a job) parked his van.” Too exhausted to argue with him, I moved my car further up the street. When I told my husband what had happened, it took everything I had to keep him from marching across the street and shoving his size 12 Dr. Marten up the old grump’s butt.

Lately, we’ve been entertaining the idea of moving. We seem to be acquiring more things than we have room for. We really need a garage and more parking. Preferably somewhere where I can’t spit and hit my neighbor’s house!

Anyway… back to Happy Town! So yes, we got the camper parked and started on our biggest DIY project to date! We began disassembling the interior. I ordered the new flooring, we went with vinyl “wood” plank flooring. They look amazing, are supposed to survive the apocalypse and be easy to DIY install. I also made a trip to JoAnn Fabric and picked out the curtain fabric. Then we started tearing up the front wall of the camper where there was some water damage and it appears we may have underestimated the severity of the damage… Womp-womp. *Sad Trombone*

Since we don’t have a garage/barn/inside place, we’ll need at least 2-3 consecutive days of good, dry weather to take off the camper’s siding and repair/replace the water damaged studs and rehang the window. Not to mention, we have to pack up everything and put it away each night. And the kicker is… we only can create ONE city trash can size amount of trash once a week. Those things are like 50 gallons maybe? And, that includes the regular trash we create from the house. Our city’s bulk pickup doesn’t take construction or remodeling refuse, so we’d technically have to pay for a dumpster. Blargh!

Even though the the extent of it all is sort of overwhelming, we’re going to keep our Glass-Half-Full-Hats on and keep on keepin’ on! Because what fun is a project if it doesn’t make you cry, rip your hair out or bleed a few times?!

Here are the photos of our progress thus far. It’s pretty scary. The interior is very reminiscent of the set of the Golden Girls.

We’ve found where the leaks were, removed the old insulation, which was soaking up the water like a sponge and keeping all that wood wet all the time. Hopefully we’ll still be able to get this fixed up and come in under budget. Which is pretty tight, due to the fact that there’s zero sense in investing more money into this thing than we’ll be able to get back out if. This is a starter camper and project piece, but eventually we’d like to downsize to something smaller and lighter. And newer.

But that’s where we are now! We’re hoping to get everything cleaned up and in working order by the end of May so we can enjoy the summer camping season. Keep your fingers crossed for us!

Summer Lovin’ – Lack of Progress

We have not gotten much of anything done this summer on the house. Womp-womp! 😦

Not to be the excuse monster, but our funds haven’t been exactly liquid over the past few months due to the necessity in May to purchase a new washer & dryer after our 7 year old pair bit the dust.

We have also been saving our pennies for a new mattress! (In our 3 bedroom house we only have one mattress, which is a full size! We gave away our cheap lumpy king size, that broke our backs when we slept on it, in the 40 Bag Challenge that we wrote about here).

We also had a few plumbing issues (one being the leaky toilet we fixed pretty cheaply and wrote about here) and most recently we had a pipe leak in our basement. Or should I say all over our basement? We capped that sucker for now and will eventually get to fixing that. It’s a pipe that runs to our back porch faucet, which isn’t a huge necessity, but it would be nice for watering our tomato plants that are currently sucking up several gallons of high-quality H2O each day that we have to haul out from the kitchen in a pitcher! (Next year, I’d like to make a rain barrel!)

And last but not least, our dear pooch, Carli had a corneal ulcer which we had to treat.

I’m not complaining, I swear!

After having to buy a new washer & dryer the week we moved in because our old pair wouldn’t fit in the door, then the “new” refrigerator, air conditioner and the roof crapped out us at our house within the first 2 years, we learned and have come to peace with the fact that homeownership is like a f%#king box of chocolates, you just never know what you’re gonna get!

I just wanted to bring you up to speed on the current status of the fact that nothing is happening at ol’ Casa Awesomesauce! And not because I gave up!

BUT we DID get to do a bit of traveling this summer, which we both have vowed to do more of! (Read about our recent Florida extravaganza here!)

With all of that out of the way now, the hubster and I decided that we’re going to pick up the ball again and get rolling on our master bedroom next! We’d like to be in there by Labor Day, or at least by our FIRST WEDDING ANNIVERSARY on September 20th! We’re hoping this will be like a big honkin’ anniversary present to ourselves!

The master bedroom is going to be the absolute hardest room in the house because in it’s current state, it is a storage room. And it just so happens to be the largest room in the freaking house. At least that room no longer houses our lawn mower (read about lawn mowers in my bedroom here!) So we’ll have to do a lot of sorting and organizing before we get down to replacing the flooring (which is an absolute must!) and painting over the African safari wall border. Let me see if I can Google it…

Purrrrrrrrrr!

The picture isn’t it exactly, but it’s pretty darn close. Now let me put a disclaimer on this… I am sure with the right decor, this would be adorable! But it doesn’t exactly go with my color scheme.

This is what I’m twerkin with! I made several of these palettes to help myself find stuff to go in each of our rooms. Since we don’t have a lot of cash to splurge up front, I pin things that I can pick up over time!

Which brings me around to Pinterest:

For any of you Pinterest-ers, I started a whole board HERE a while ago for our master bedroom!

I realize a million people pin a million things per day on Pinterest and unfortunately sometimes Pinterest is  the place where dreams and ideas go to die.

But I’ve realized for me (a self-diagnosed List Nazi!!), it’s an easy list-making tool when I’m out and about or online shopping and I find things that I love! I just pin them so that way I can go back later when I have the time or money and buy the item, or do some hard-core online scouring to find something similar on the cheap.

Heck, I even use Pinterest as a wish list! I pin things we need at home or things that I’d like (you know, for when holidays and birthdays roll around!) Travis swears it has made Christmas and Christmas shopping his “favorite thing in the world,” and that’s a pretty big deal coming from someone who was never really a fan of holiday celebrations and hates gift shopping!

But back to the board: On my Master Bedroom board, I made a palette (above). I did that with all of the rooms that we’re giving a facelift so I have something to go by to virtually build each room before I even pick up a paint brush or start droppin’ cash! I actually own that comforter! I snagged it at Target last year sometime and I’ve used it from the beginning to make my palette and find things that “go” with it but aren’t matchy-matchy. As my darling Sherry over at Young House Love has said before: “Matchy Matchy Tacky Tacky!”

SO… Like I said, with this room there is a lot to do, but no real time frame. Other than we would really like to move into that room by fall since it tends to be a bit cooler, and we love sleeping in a chilly room so we can burrow under big fluffy blankets with our dogs without sweating to death! It also has french doors that lead out onto our patio, which makes taking the dogs out to do “their business” in the night or in the morning much easier. Especially if we have house guests… Our dogs are “morning people” and tend to prance through the house early in the morning, which sounds a little bit like a bull in a china shop!

And we would really like to have more house guests, and moving back into our master bedroom would obviously free up the spare bedroom which we’ve been occupying!

Well that was a bit of a long-winded post! My apologies on that! Congratulations and thanks if you made it to the end!

 

Camper “palette”

 

We’re going to do our best on a very small budget! I’ve loaded up on tons of coupons and dug out unused gift cards! And after poking around on the interwebs, I decided I’m going to do the upholstery myself. Even though I’ve been told by several people “Upholstery takes real craft and precision. You should leave it to a professional.”

Two thoughts on that:

• A professional wants to charge me around $500, and that doesn’t include the cost of material. I could buy a new couch for that price. Yikes.
• I was also told to leave it to professionals before I re-sided a house, refurbished a 35 year old boat, rebuilt a 20 year old motorcycle AND before I schooled my husband last weekend on how to replace the fan clutch AND his third brake light in his truck… all in under two hours.  (That really happened.)

I’m not saying I think I’m a badass because I have boobs and can hold a wrench or a hammer, and I’m really not trying to come off as some know-it-all punk kid either…
But how do people learn they can do something, if everyone tells them they shouldn’t even try?

If I mess it up, you can say “I told you so,” if that’ll make you feel good. If I do it and it turns out awesome, well that’s awesome!

“Lord, I was born a ramblin’ man!”

As you may have seen on Facebook, we are now proud owners of a camper.

Although she has not made her maiden voyage with us yet (technically), she has been dubbed: Hell On Wheels.

She’s 1988 Prowler Lynx 26 ft Travel Trailer. And she’s a beaut! She’s a little dated, but her bones are nice and sturdy. She might need a few coats of paint, new upholstery and curtains, but that’s nothing that will break the bank and can probably easily be done in a weekend or two.

I don’t have pictures of ours yet, but found lots of pics online of other people’s. I’d like to remind you that she’s nearly 30 years old and my-oh-my weren’t the 80’s a sexy time!

 

The outside front. The big rectangley thing under “Lynx” flips up and makes an awning over the window behind it.

 

The view when you first step in the front door. Dinette to the left, kitchenette straight ahead (complete with fridge, stove, oven, sink and microwave) and the jackknife sofa to the right.

 

The view when standing in the bathroom. The front door is there on the right between the jackknife sofa and the dinette. The window behind the sofa is the front window with the awning.

 

The view from the bedroom exterior door. Having another door in the bedroom will be nice for when we camp with dogs and other people. We won’t have to clamber through the front of the camper to bang around letting dogs out, or trying to get outside.

 

Like I said, I think ours is in a little better shape. Our still has the refrig (it’s torn out beside the stove in the 2nd picture) and it looks really new. This is the rig we took on our Annual Memorial Day Camping Extravaganza in 2013 and aside from a tiny leak in the front, she held up fantastically. But not including the fact that the back door blew off the hinges. BUT we fixed that already! G2G!

Yes… so this will be the next project. We have lost steam in the house while we’ve been going through some occupational challenges lately. But we’re both super eager to get this lady on the road so we can enjoy some time OUT of the house this summer.

I have even started mapping out a Campground Bucket List on Pinterest based on some cool looking parks I’ve always wanted to check out and some recommendations made by some folks in a camping forum I visit. We already have just about everything else we’d need since we’ve been camping for 10+ years already and we’ve had a pop up camper before. Plus I’ve been squirreling away odds and ends for years for the eventual day that we got another camper. Things like pots and pans, baking sheets, a spare coffee pot etc. Things that will live forever in the camper. Not to mention I can get the 4 huge rubbermaid totes out of my closet room now full of camping crap. I can put all of that stuff in it’s forever home in the camper!

We’re just praying that this won’t turn into another misadventure like the boat and our first motorcycle was. But those are a story for another time!

Let the adventures begin!

Wax Ecstatic – Homemade Citronella Candles

I love the smell of Citronella. I know some people hate it, but I think it’s awesomesauce!

Maybe because it reminds me of summertime and sitting on my back porch with my BFFs or of sitting out on the dock at the lake as a kid. Whatever the case, the smell makes me happy. And luckily that smell really honks off mosquitos! So I’m really killing two bugs birds with one stone!

So recently I found a pin on Pinterest on how to make your own citronella candles that really tickled my fancy! I decided this would be a relatively cheap and fun adventure with a low risk of me completely destroying something or burning down my house!

It was actually really super easy. I read up on several other sites on the best way to do things, and sort of tweaked the recipe a little bit to how it would work best for me. Garden Therapy and a few other folks used their old candles and melted them down. I however chose to order some soy wax online. (I got a 10lb bag for under $20.) I like the feel and smell of soy wax a lot better, I think they burn cleaner and are easier to clean up after should something spill.

If you’d like to give it a try, this is how I did it and what you’ll need:

1. Cans (I used soup cans)
2. A double boiler (I used a big stock pot with a smaller older sauce pan inside it)
3. A Metal cookie cutter (to keep your wax pot propped off the bottom of the water pot so it doesn’t over-heat the wax)
4. A ladle
5. Soy Wax chips/shavings
6. Pre-Waxed wicks with tabs (measure your can, you want the wick to be at least as tall as your can, you can trim it if need be)
7. Citronella (or whatever scent you like) Essential Oil
   NOT E – NOT  the oil that you put in your tiki torches… get yourself a good essential oil. I really like Piping Rock’s oils and they are very affordable.
8. Some sort of glue to glue the wicks to the bottom of your can. I used super glue, hot glue would work… whatever you have laying around!
9. Clothespins (2 for every can)
10. Some twine, jute ribbon or anything else if you’d like to decorate the can afterwards

Directions:

1. Set up your cans with wicks.

I don’t have a baby hand, so I couldn’t fit my hand into the can to smash the glue-covered wick tab against the bottom to adhere it. So I used a straw. I slid the string end of the wick into the straw, then squeezed the straw to hold onto the wick inside of it and then used the straw to press the wick tab against the bottom of the tab until the glue set.

Someone else said they used a white Bic pen tube. I guess that would work, but I thought it would be hard to keep the wick in the tube.

 

2. Measure out your wax. I just eyeballed mine! (I think I ended up using probably 10-15 cups of wax for 3 cans. I added it in two batches since wax chips take up significantly more room than melted wax does. I let the first bowl full melt, then slowly added in more chips.)

 

 

3. Set up your double boiler. You want your water at a nice SIMMER… boiling is not necessary and will actually probably make things harder for you! Put the metal cookie cutter in the pot with water, then set your pot with wax on TOP of the cookie cutter. This keeps your wax pot off the bottom of the water pot. I don’t know if this is completely needed, but since I wasn’t using a candy thermometer, and wasn’t interested in catching my house on fire, I used a cookie cutter.

 

 

4. The wax will sort of melt like cold butter does. It melts rather quickly so make sure you don’t wander off during this step! You’ll want to stir it until it becomes a clear liquid and there are no more chunks of solid wax in it! Some people use a candy thermometer for this. I don’t have one, so I was just REALLY careful and guessed when it was ready. If you’re nervous about this part, please use a thermometer.

Helpy-Helperton NOTE:
The melting point of soy wax is 122 degrees.
You want a pour temp of about 125 degrees.
The flash point (FIRE!) of soy wax is 450 degrees! Please be safe about this and do not leave your wax unattended!

 

 

 

5. Ok so now that your wax is “molten” (that’s kind of a scary word), you can add your citronella!

I used a teaspoon or so, maybe like 20 drops? I didn’t really measure this part, I just added and stirred until I thought it smelled nice!
I guess the rule of thumb is 1 oz of Citronella oil per pound of wax.

 

 

6. Stir for about one minute to make sure the oil is mixed well.

 

7. Adhere the clothespins to the wicks to keep the wicks straight while you pour and while they are cooling. You don’t want your wicks to move at all while cooling.
Then carefully ladle your molten wax into your cans. I filled three cans up to about an inch under the top.

 

 

8. Let your cans cool in a warm place undisturbed for at least 48 hours before using!

 

 

9. Decorate the outside of your cans with twine or ribbon or jute ribbon for a cute, rustic, finished look!

Skip-to-ma-LOO

 

See what I did there?

Last night we added one more skill to our ever-expanding list of DIY capabilities! Plumbing.

Even though we’ve dabbled in plumbing before… we’ve replaced garbage disposals, faucets, drains and last spring our water heater tank crapped out on us (oh the puns in this post!). I woke up one Thursday morning to enjoy my daily steamy shower, only to be blessed with what felt like glacial run-off coming out of our shower head.

After consulting Tony the Tiger (my dad, the go-to for all home related questions), he felt confident we’d be capable of replacing it on our own. So after work that night, we rolled up our sleeves and plunged in.

Long story short: They didn’t make tanks like our old one any more. So we actually had to cut, rearrange and weld new copper water pipes to feed the water supply into the water tank. After about 10 trips to a few different hardware stores, a whole weekend without water (every time we turned the main back on, the pipes to the water heater leaked profusely), that Sunday night around 7pm (after a gas leak scare) we finally had hot water. Whew!

And yes, we did shower that weekend. My BFFs Amanda and Bryon were kind enough to allow us to shower at their place! Thanks guys!

Even tho the whole hot water tank situation really pissed us off at the time, we were kind of glad to have the opportunity to learn to do something new, and that we saved quite a bit of money doing it ourselves. There’s just something fulfilling in brushing off the dust at the end and admiring your handy work.

So when we finally got fed up with our eternally slow-dripping wall-hung toilet last night, we rolled up our sleeves again and realized that you don’t always have to be a plumber *or a pro* to be able to fix something. Luckily,  it all boiled down to some rusty screws, deteriorated seals and a not-fully-tightened water connection. We were thrilled that it didn’t end up being something we had to call in a professional for and spend an arm and a leg to have replaced.  No butt crack required! Wooo!

But there are still A LOT of things that we’re still petrified to do or just simply refuse to do ourselves. Mostly electrical or things that require special equipment.

There are also a lot of things that we have ALREADY done and can do relatively efficiently. Like upholstery, hanging siding, painting, drywalling, a lot of automotive stuff… (Travis is the automotive guy, I try to help and learn what and where I can.) We’ve replaced everything from brakes, to two fuel pumps (ugh both required dropping the tank, one in the blistering summer heat, and one in the frigid arctic winter – and we don’t have a garage). We put my completely deer-wrecked Sunfire back together with Frankenstein parts (new hood, doors, headlights etc…) We completely rebuilt our first motorcycle, a 1983 Honda Nighthawk and did a LOT of work on our second ’99 Yamaha Vstar… We rehabbed a pop-up camper, rebuilt a ski boat from scratch without anything but the hull! (Which we traded for our Vstar!)

I could go on, but you get the idea!

Anyway, the point is we don’t really have any real training on any of this stuff. We just kind of have had to do a lot of it, mostly to save some money. I guess we’ve always been into “DIY” and just didn’t realize it. There’s almost always something going on around our house, I’m just really stoked that we’re finally getting around to doing all this fun stuff IN the house!

I LOVE LAMP… Shade!

Ok, so this is kind of my first DIY hack… I found this amazingly awesome lamp shade that I LERVE at Lowes on Saturday. I had been looking to replace my 10 year old, extremely juvenile, multi-color multi-armed lamp circa my college days, which finally took the midnight train to Splitsville a few weeks ago. Since then, I have been changing and putting away clothes in my closet room for a week by flashlight. (It’s always an adventure at my house!) I thought it was probably time to accept the loss and make a new purchase.

 

Mmm, so Chevron-y!

 

The only problem with this amazingly awesome lamp shade was that it was for a standard lamp. The shade has the three metal arms which connect to the top of the shade and then bend down almost to the bottom of the shade where they meet a big ring. You sit this ring around the top of your lamp and then screw the bulb in through the ring, and the bulb keeps the shade in place. Which after doing some research, I found out was called a “Slip UNO Fitter”. What I really needed for this light kit was a “Spider Fitter”. Silly me!

 

For your lampy pleasure!

 

This normally would not be a big deal, but I had been dreaming of putting a pendant light in there with an amazing drum shade. Drum shades are kind of a big thing right now, and normally I don’t follow the “in” crowd, but I really REALLY liked this shade! Chevrons are so dreamy!

So to make a long story short… this lamp shade was not meant to be used as a pendant lamp. Sadness.

But Travis, being the hacker that he usually is, thought he could find a way to make it work. But alas, when we arrived home… his only idea did not pan out. So that’s where my big ol’ brains came in! And it didn’t even involve duct tape OR zip ties!

Get yourself the following:

1. A Slip UNO Fitter lamp shade you wish to use for a pendant light
2. A pendant light kit (available just about everywhere lamps are sold)
3. Some thin, twistable yet durable wire (garden wire worked out just dandy!)
4. A washer that fits on the swag light kit
5. Some wire cutters or anything that will cut through the wire you’ve chosen

 

The washer has to fit loosely over this piece. When you’re done, the white cap on the bottom unscrews, slip the washer on (with wires attached) then screw the cap back on.

 

 

 

 

This one’s out of order, I know…

 

So this is where it get’s tricky for me to explain, even though it’s SUPER easy to do and took me less than 3 minutes to do. I’m just new to this whole DIY, step by step instructions, explaining thing!

1. Cut three pieces of wire the exact same length. (If your lamp has four arms inside the shade, use four wires. If it only has two, only use two wires etc!)
   I cut mine to be about 12 inches. This is what is going to hang your shade from the pendant kit.
2. Using about 1-2 inches of your wire, wrap each piece of wire around the washer once or twice and then twist it so it will not come off the washer.
   (Like how you use a twist tie on a bread bag!) But make sure your wires are all the still the same length! You may have to unwrap and re-wrap a time or two, but make sure your wires are the same length, so the shade hangs evenly in the end.
   
3. At the other end of the wires, the part that’s not attached to the washer, measure one inch, then bend the wire to mark that point. Do this with each of the wires.
4. Now “twist tie” these ends of the wires to the “arms” inside the lamp shade. One wire for each “arm”.
   
5. Unscrew the “cap” on the pendant kit, slide the washer with the wires attached to it onto the threaded piece and then screw the cap back on.

Mine is a tad messy looking, but after I hung it, I realized you can’t see ANY of the wires unless you’re looking up through the bottom. After I put the diffuser on it you won’t be able to see them at all.

 

At this point, you’re pretty much finished! You can hang your light as is. I thought about cutting off the extra lamp ring and the excess length of arms on the inside of the lamp, but eventually I plan to use that to affix something to the bottom to serve as a “diffuser” shade so you wouldn’t be able to see up into the shade where the light bulb is. It gives it more of a “finished” look. But at this point, I was just eager to get some light in my closet room, so I hung mine up and will put the shade in later.

 

See the shade at the bottom? It’s just a plastic-y piece that fits in there so you can’t see the ugly bulb and so it’s a softer light.