If you are handed it, you can handle it.

This is Herbert, Herbert this is the internet

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:26:09 -0400

My friends Alison and Erin came up for lunch on Friday and they bought me this gift! Its a bobble head turtle and I named him Herbert and he sits on my desk. The amazing part is that his head often bobbles on its own, must be the vibrations in the building but there he sits all day nodding his head at me telling me I am doing a good job!

Thanks!

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Sunflowers!

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:15:56 -0400

Sunflowers are my absolute favorite and Matty left these on my desk today - they are directly from the farmers market and my favorite!

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And now back to the garden

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:49:28 -0400

I didn't post anything this week, after the large hurdle we got over last weekend with the floor I took some much needed time off this week from things I have to do... but now its time to get serious again.

The house is moving along nicely and the kitchen is put back together. He is now working on the sanding and taping of the living room and we will be ready to paint no later than Sunday the 20th, which means I could be back in the living room, electricity and all by August 1st! I think that was our goal.

While we have been busy in the house Matt has been busy in the garden. Right before I had to send back the fisheye and 100mm lenses (*sniff) I grabbed some shots of what we are growing.

Here is the garden in its entirety - the only thing you can't see is the pumpkins:

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Here I am just inside the fence watching Matt water our cauliflower:

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Here I am on the other side.

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Here is my matty getting some water for our veggies!

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Its hard to tell what stuff is because its all just green, lets get closer!

Tomatoes:

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Looking down the row of tomatoes

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Thats my shadow!

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Here is some lettuce, we had this for dinner last night

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And some onions but they aren't even close

This is the whole area of lettuce and peppers, and matt hauling water

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We also had squash last night, those plants are growing like crazy and I bet we start having squash a couple of nights a week now

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We are also going to have zucchini very very soon

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Corn is on its way up but I don't think we have that til August

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And the potatoes have flowers and they will die in the fall, that is how we know to dig them up

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These are my sunflowers! Thanks to Matt's fence I might actually see them bloom this year!

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Well I hope you have enjoyed the tour of the garden, you will see another house post maybe in the middle of this week and I might actually shoot some images for fun this weekend!

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6 Months - Tomorrow

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 21:13:33 -0400

Tomorrow Matt and I celebrate our 6 month anniversary and the gift this month is IRON!

I GOT THE MOST PERFECTIST GIFT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD! I couldn't even photograph it ahead of time because the company it came from had it wrapped so perfectly... but I can tell you it was made in Japan.

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Matt loves Japan. I love squares and worms and anything miniature and Matt loves Japan - thats how we do it in this relationship. We don't love the same things but we love each other and that is what counts and what makes it work.

I can't wait to show you what is in the box, but that will have to wait until tomorrow :)

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Floors

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:15:49 -0400

I have more images and great tales to tell about the floor from this weekend but for now images will have to do:

The floor before:

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In the middle of this project:

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My floors now!!!!!!!!!!

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EVEN THE MUDROOM LOOKS AMAZING!!

I don't think I have a before :(

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This article is perfect for me

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 13:33:33 -0400

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/homestyle/06/30/o.where.i.live/index.html

I like this line best:

Casual observers would most likely point to the seeming deus ex machina blind date of July 2001, when I met an architect who's good with his hands. We fell in love, then married -- both of which took up time I could have spent stripping woodwork.

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Wasn't this Matt's stupid idea?

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:14:17 -0400

Those were the words our of my sisters Kim's mouth on Sunday morning while the 5 of us were busy scraping the floor and Matt was at breakfast with his friends... but let me back up a minute and get us to that point officially. When last I posted were ALMOST finished chipping up all the tile from the floor (and my hand was already hurting) - well that was Wednesday. Thursday night Matt came over and we tackled the last bit - and it seemed to be the hardest - so after another 3 hours of work we had the entire tile up and my hand was in a permanent hooked position. We went to bed realizing we had already spent 9 hours just getting the tile up. But my sister was coming over on Friday to help me, I had rented the wallpaper steamer on the way home Thursday night, and we were going to have the kitchen floor cleared of black stuff in one day! ONE DAY! After Erin's advice and all the reading I had done on the internet it seemed that hot water was the key so how could we go wrong with the wallpaper steamer!

For perspective, here was the floor Friday morning when Kim arrived

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That black stuff is NASTY! It had turned my entire kitchen into a giant pool of fly paper - every time you walked across it you stuck to it, and the dog was licking it and it was a MESS!!! And because its a petroleum based product the entire kitchen smelled like an oil spill

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and once you got to this stage you couldn't really quit and come back to it because of the sticky factor - it was just everywhere and making the kitchen impossible to live in. Unless of course you are the dog - then you standing sentry in the middle of the fly paper waiting to see what the hell is going to go on next.

See my beautiful cabinets in the back - I had forgotten how nice my kitchen can be *sigh*

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OK so Kim comes over and we start with the steamer. And let me tell you it is NOT ANYWHERE NEAR AS EASY AS THEY SAID. It was the messiest, most disgusting, dirtiest home renovation job I have done - and I have done them all. I have worked in plumbing and sewer drains, I have renovated baths and kitchens, I have laid insulation in attics on hot summer days, I have cleaned rats out of walls, i have done most everything and this job goes down in history as being the WORST JOB EVER. Not 10 minutes into the job Kim and I are in full gear - respirator masks because of the possible asbestos, gloves, eye masks, clothes we are willing to throw away - here is Kim and our wallpaper steamer. See the word hope above Kim’s head? We had none by the end of the day.

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The steamer seems to work but only on the top most layers, so what you have to do is sit the steamer there for several minutes and then move it to another spot while you scrap away that spot and them move back and forth between the two spots until you can get down to the floor. It takes good 4 or 5 rounds in each spot to get down to the floor. Now let me tell you it wasn't coming up like "chocolate pudding" as some of the people on the internet say. It was only coming up if you scraped hard with the chisel and put your weight behind it. So let me paint a better picture. You are down on your hands and knees, wearing a mask so you can't breathe; you are surrounded by steam because you are that close to the wallpaper steamer and you are gripping the chisel for all your life so you can scrap away the black stuff. After ten minutes your hand is clenched so tight you can't get it off the chisel and you are completely wet from the knees down since you are kneeling in pools of water and your head is a cloud of steam.

The problem of only one steamer immediately arose. Since you had to work two patches at once it was impossible for us to work together. So I went off trying other things. I boiled up big pots of water and covered my floors (and also all my clean clothes in the basement when it dripped down) thinking if I got the floor wet before Kim got to it then it would be easier - that didn't work. I used a squirt bottle of hot water, that didn't work. I used hot towels, that didn't work. NOTHING WORKED except picking it way piece by piece with the chisel. By 11:30 we weren't sure how we were going to make it. Sure it was incredibly hard work and while we were complaining about that we were also concerned about how actually this was going to get finished. We were not making quick work of this and now the place is a real mess and I only have Kim til 1:30 or so because well she has kids and a life. So we took a quick break for lunch and then went back at it realizing the only way to tackle this was piece by piece. I was a mess. Dad was in the living room happily joint compounding, sometimes shouting in words of encouragement and the favorite phrase of the day "Its going to look great when its done" - If I never hear that again it is OK with me! Seriously at that point I wasn't sure I cared if it was going to look great when it was done. I wasn't sure it was ever going to get done and all I could think in my head is "When am I going to get a chance to work on this again?" You see, I had a wedding to photography on Saturday and then would likely be too tired to work on Sunday after being on our feet all day Saturday. I determined at that point I was going to have to quit my job, or at least tell my boss I couldn't come back until it was done - but when would that be?

Kim left at 1:30 and I slugged through another 2 hours. I was DEAD at that point, and filthy and the house was worse than every because now all the black stuff had been wet at least a little bit so it was stickier than ever! I only quit working at 3:30 because I was worried about the wedding the next day. My had was already bruised and cramping from holding the chisel for 6 hours - what if I couldn't get my fingers to work the next day! So I had to stop. I cleaned up the best I could, then went to my room and packed my stuff up for the wedding. When Matt got home I was in a bad spot - my body hurt and I was worried and dog tired!

He took me to dinner (thank you!) and we discussed our plan. Obviously I was going to have to work on the floor on Sunday - we couldn't leave it in that state! He wanted to get the fence up around the garden because we were getting to the point where the animals might think it’s pretty tasty. Kim had agreed to come back on Sunday and help me and to bring Brian along to help Matt with the fence - so at least we were going to have a team there.

Saturday morning I jump out of bed and realized I am seriously running on adrenaline and fear right now. My hands hurt but what could I do about it! I bring the dog over to my mothers so she can watch her for the day and that is when I tell my parents something they NEVER want to hear from us "I think I am in over my head with this project". I barley get the words out of my mouth when they both say "NO YOUR NOT!" and proceed to tell me what they think I should do - all good ideas. I think what I meant by over my head was not in terms of the work itself (sure it was hard but I could do it) or understanding the technical pieces (again I knew how to get the paper off the floor) I just meant in terms of too many projects at once.

This project requires some serious time and I didn't have it - I have a day job, I have a photography business and a wedding to shoot, we have the garden fence and the dog and just general life necessities like groceries and clean bathrooms. I felt I was in over my head in terms of too many projects at once. I left there not feeling any better - what I wanted was my parents to tell me it was all going to be ok, but they just told me I would be fine. I went home to pack the car and dad showed up a while later. He wanted to try and sand the black stuff and see if it would help. Sure the sanding worked, but it was clogging up the pads and it wasn't working well enough. I told him that my plan was to go on Sunday morning and rent another wallpaper steamer and Kim and I could work in tandem to finish it on Sunday - I didn't know how else to do it because it had to get done.

So Matt and I went and shot the wedding. It was a LONG day and we didn't get home til 11:30PM and by the time I had the images backed up it was 12:30AM before we went to bed. There were some new buckets and stuff in the house when we got home so I figured my dad had tried some other things.

I was up at 6:30 dressed and ready to work. I don't know how I got up - I figure it was the fear of not getting it done, or the adrenaline or something. I called my parents to see if they had discovered anything that would keep me from renting a steamer that day and my mother said "Yes, we are going to use heat guns. When your father came home yesterday he said that we were going to have to get into now to help you out” THANK YOU! Clearly they now felt I was in over my head! So they told me what kinds of chisels to buy and I went off to Home Depot. They told me I didn't need another heat gun but I bought one anyway - if that was going to work then I was going to make sure there were enough on hand for all of us to have one.

Matt went to have breakfast with his friends - seriously I told him to - he would be back by 9:30 and there would still be work to do!

I got home with food for the Walls family and when I got home my parents were already there, Kim and Brian and the girls followed shortly afterwards and by 8:30AM we were all back on our hands and knees working - ALL OF US - well not the girls they were having bagels in the makeshift living room:)

By this point my body wanted to give out - my hands had been in acramped position for days, when I knelt down on the floor and my knees hit the wood it felt like knives going through them and my back was hurting from days of being hunched over and then carrying an 8lbs camera at chest height all day Saturday. It was a disaster but there we all were. And that is when the infamous "Wasn't this Matt's stupid idea? Why isn't he here" came out of Kim's mouth. Well, this was Matt's idea - I wanted tile, which would have precluded all of this work, we would have sub floored over the black stuff and called it good, but Matt wanted hardwood and I wanted to compromise so we went this way. But he was at breakfast with his friends and I am not sure Kim found that funny because at that point she had put more time in on the black stuff then Matt had.

Matt arrived a short while later and then we all got to work. The heat guns seemed to be working, but it was going to be slow going because you had to work little bit by little bit. There were too many people in the house and not enough guns, but there was a propane torch that I was sure was going to light the place on fire, so I went to help Matt with the fence and took the girls with me.

I needed something to keep the girls occupied, I tried to teach them to pick peas but they were too rough and Matt wasn't happy. Then they just ran around for a while and Matt and I worked on the fence. But the fence wasn't my thing, I couldn't figure out how to bend the wire and my mind was on the house. When I had my 4th piece or so up and Matt came over and said "Do you mind if I redo this" I knew I needed to go back inside. I was already maxed out for stress and when I am stressed it makes Matt stressed so for the first time ever I heard him raise his voice and tell someone to shut the door. Going inside was going to be the best for all of us. So I went in and switched with Brian and they had the fence done lickety split. There isn't much to say about the next several hours. Mom took the girls and went back to her house, where they wouldn't be in the way. Dad cleaned up the wallpaper steamer for me so Home Depot wouldn't charge me for the mess we had made. It down poured for a few minutes but then the sun came out. Dad also tried some more sanding to see how it would go. After the fence we sent Matt to Home Depot to return the steamer and to get some more sanding pads. Dad left around noon, Pizza was delivered and we ate in shift but above all we all kept working on our hands and knees scraping the tar paper away.

Somewhere around 1PM I felt there was enough of a clear patch that someone could try sanding with the pads Matt had brought back. You see Dad had sanded a bit of a patch clear enough so I could see what it might become, and it gave me a glimmer of hope. I thought that if we sanded a bigger patch I might be able to look at that and keep going because at this point we were all tired. So fired up the sander and Brian went to work. While he was going that Matt and I kept going with the heat guns and Kim cleaned my bathroom because she told me the health department would shut me down if they saw it. We worked in little patches all around the room - first the gun and then the sander and wouldn't you know it we had the damn thing done by 2:30. Almost all of it done!

There was a moment when Matt was working with the heat gum and Brian had 1/2 of the floor sanded that I had to get up and hug Kim and thank her for coming to help me, and I started to cry. She of course told Brian I was getting emotional, which I was, and I think Matt had to hold himself back from getting up to hug me because I was crying. IN that moment I was so overcome with thankfulness because I could see that by the end of the day the floor would be done - the sticky would be gone and we would be able to put this behind us. When I woke up Sunday morning I was filled with despair, not sure how I was honestly going to take care of this - I was already planning on taking another personal day for Monday. And now it was behind me and I couldn't be happier.

Here is what it looked like!

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This did not come without a price. All of us are still sore. Matt and I are going for massages tonight and Brian goes on Thursday. Kim says she is fine but she will exact her price later.

My dad showed up at 7AM yesterday so he could see the floor - he says it looks 3000 times better.

For my part I will never do another floor or I will hire people. I think I could buy a house that has carpet over hardwood but I won't do linoleum or tile over hardwood. This job just sucked to much and I am not sure my sanity is worth it.

Next up is finishing the kitchen mudroom floors. We are going to go in shifts and with any luck we will be ready to go and refinish this floor this weekend! You won't see another post from me on that until then - so check back next week!

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Renovation through the eye of a fish!

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:00:52 -0400

I have been away from posting for over a week - its just been too busy and my hand had hurt too much and stuff. But here is where we are.

The sheetrock is on the walls in the living room and my dad came over this morning to start doing the taping. These images were taken with the fisheye at 2.8 - LOOK AT HOW MUCH LIGHT THERE IS! And that room is dark during the day in the summer.

Here is a shot from one back corner:

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and then from the other

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and then a view from the kitchen looking in:

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if there wasn't so much dust you could almost site on the couch and enjoy yourself...HA!

As for the kitchen floor well that is turning into a true labor of love. My hand aches today from holding a hammer for two nights in a row and a downward 45 degree angle while using a chisel to get the old tile up bit by bit. Tuesday night Matt and I worked together and got a ton done, and last night I worked alone and got a fair bit done. This is all we have left

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and another shot

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we need to finish it up tonight ( not sure how much help I will be) because I took the day off of work tomorrow so my sister and I can get the black stuff up. I was going to wait and take Monday off to do it but I will feel better once its done! I have a wedding to shoot on Saturday and I don't want to come back from that and have to worry about working on the floor - if we can finish it tomorrow then I won't have to worry about anything til July 4th when we play to free the floor from years of misuse - its own Independance day (CORNY!)

This is the transition from the kitchen to the living room:

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These floors are going to completely ROCK!

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Matty's garden: up close and personal

nobody@vox.com(audralynn) — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:19:19 -0400

I rented some lenses for the wedding I am shooting this weekend because I want to make sure it ROCKS! They came yesterday and this morning I went out to the garden to try them out.

I LOVE THEM!

I rented a Fisheye and now all you fine folk could get a view of the entire garden. Matty is doing such a great job! Those posts you see - those are for the fence Matt is putting up to keep the deer out - maybe I will have sunflowers yet!

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I also rented a 100mm Macro lense. It means I can be faraway but still get close up!

This is our baby tomato - we have a few:

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This is our baby summer squash - we have TONS of these starting:

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These are our peas - they are ready to eat this weekend!

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This is one of the sunflowers - I can just see its gloriousness already!

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This is some herb I am growing but I can't remember what - anyone know?

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