Tuesday, September 25, 2012
Mattress Shopping, Offgassing, and an Allergic Dog
Posted by Alex

Wendy and I have a bad habit of living with things even though they’re well beyond their useful life. This fact is extremely apparent when looking at our old kitchen appliances. Though they probably should have been replaced within the first few years after we bought our house, we decided “they’d do” until we eventually renovated our kitchen for real.

Call it maturity, foolishness, impatience, or just stupidity, but we’ve started to feel there has been an error in our ways. Items we’ve long lived with, and have done so without major issue, have begun to wear on us. Lately, we feel like it’s high time to start replacing many of the things we’ve just been talking about replacing for some time now. One of those items is our old and tired mattress.

You may have seen photos of the bed in our master bedroom before. The bed itself is a beautiful carved Louis XVI antique bed from the turn of the 19th century, but the mattress…oh the mattress.

The queen size mattress is actually the same mattress that Wendy bought back in August 2000 on the weekend we moved to Washington DC. It lived in our apartment, then in two rooms of our home, but it was never particularly comfortable. Always too hard for us, we’ve slept with at least one and usually two down feather beds laid on top of it for years.


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Monday, September 24, 2012
From Damaged to Delightful - Dishwasher Adventures
Posted by Alex

As we mentioned in our kitchen apppliance delivery recap, we had a few minor issues with the delivery of a few items. The dishwasher was the worst off, having been dropped in the box and crushed rather significantly. Additionally, a somewhat minor scratch along the left side of the fridge was causing additional strife since it is immediately apparent when you walk into the house through the back door.

I'm a little more easy going about this sort of thing, but Wendy was not pleased and didn't plan on letting it slide (I do really like her for this aspect of her personality). She called up h.h. gregg to coordinate the re-delivery of the dishwasher and also to discuss the fridge scratch.

As I mentioned previously, the customer service at h.h. gregg was good and immediately scheduled redelivery and pickup of the damaged dishwasher, and they did it around our schedule. Another great mark for them in the customer service column, they agreed to knock another $100 off of the price of the fridge on account of the scratch.

If you're keeping score, this means our fridge's original price, $1,800, knocked down to $1,000 due to stocking issue with the fridge we wanted, was now further discounted to $900 due to a small and easily fixed (or ignored) scratch. Final deal, a whopping 50% discount. Not too shabby. Way to go Wendy.

We scheduled the redelivery for the day after we returned from vacation, since Wendy had planned to take the day off. I was planning on working, but due to flight delays, missing luggage, and a travel day of nearly 19 hours, I also ended up staying home.


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Friday, September 21, 2012
Update on the Kids: Lulu and Mel's Tumor Battles
Posted by Alex

Though we wanted to share some of our vacation highlights and photos with you today, we're still getting our arms around everything since we returned home from the trip. Most notably, we've been getting a handle on the treatment of Mel and Lulu's medical issues. And to be completely honest, each time I sat down to start writing about the vacation, I really couldn't concentrate, typically because I had the sweet head of one of our pets nearby that was just begging to be scratched.

When we left for our trip we did so with some trepidation. Lulu and Mel were both recovering from their respective surgeries, and we hadn't heard the results of Lulu or Mel's pathology report from the removal of their two mast cell tumors. Talk about bad timing for a vacation. Fortunately, we were able to head out of town knowing that both Lulu and Mel were being cared for by people who loved them and would look out for them.

Knowing Wendy would be a wreck on vacation if we got bad news, I arranged with the vet to email me with the results when they came in. My plan was to share the results with Wendy if they were great. Otherwise, I planned to quietly make arrangements for when we returned.


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Thursday, September 20, 2012
Toolbox Thurdsay: Our Quest for Better Tile Spacers
Posted by Alex

We had a bit much going on this week for a Toolbox Tuesday, so I figured I'd make it a Toolbox Thursday. It still has the alliteration I'm looking for, so we'll go for it and see how it feels as a more permanent toolbox day. 

In our post about our adventures in tiling, we covered the difficulties associated with the tile spacers we ended up working with. As we outlined, the troubles we encountered were handled with a tremendous amount of swearing and a tiny bit of patience that we somehow miraculously mustered. However, in retrospect, this really didn’t have to be the case.

Sure, spacers are often optional for the professional that can typically eyeball a joint space and ensure a consistent and even look across an install, but that’s the benefit that comes with having years and thousands of hours of tiling experience. But what about us, the beginner tile setters of the world that just want to DIY a few tile jobs? The good news is, we have a few options, but some are decidedly better than others.

While installing our kitchen backsplash we ended up using a 1/16” grout joint and very consistent machine made tiles that we purchased from Lowes. The thing about machine made tiles is that they are all exactly the same size with essentially no variation whatsoever. When working with this type of tile, I’ve often heard that the good old tile spacers that you can pick up at any big box store are the best to use. They are a consistent size and give you the same spacing everywhere.

In the past we’ve worked with stone and handmade tile. In the case of stone and handmade tile, the sizes have irregularities that you often need to make slight changes in layout to accommodate. In these cases, I’ve been told to use spacers that allow for some adjustment.


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Wednesday, September 19, 2012
Appliance Delivery - From Calm & Cool to Major Meltdown
Posted by Alex

Though we’ve been updating you over the last week on the progress we've made involving our kitchen work, we were actually getting you up to speed on the work we finished prior to taking a vacation. Wendy and I were wandering around several countries in Europe over the last week, all in the name of celebrating our 10 year anniversary. We’ll fill you in a little more on the details of our destination a little bit later this week, but until then, we have some more great kitchen progress to share with you.

Just before we left for our trip we received a bit of good…no, GREAT news. The word -- our new appliances were scheduled to be delivered. Oh what a happy day it had the potential to be. We’ve been living with our old and outdated appliances for nearly a full decade, and we were absolutely ready to upgrade. Though we’ve long been wearing our tired, dated, and ugly appliances as a badge of honor and courage, we were very excited to finally be able to put the function and visual appeal of new appliances to use.

The morning of the delivery I took some final photos of our appliances before we disconnected them and bid them a fond farewell. I have to be completely honest here, it was a little bit of a bittersweet moment, but it was only a tiny bit bitter, and a whole lot of sweet. These old workhorses were our first appliances in the first house that we bought together, and they're representative of what our home was when we purchased it -- tired but functional.

Due to the appliance delivery, I was working from home this day and Wendy was at her office, so there was no help on this job, I was flying solo. But this was just a delivery, how hard could it be, right? Wrong! It turned out to be one of the most stressful events I’ve encountered while working on our house. No, I’m not even joking.

The delivery was scheduled for the morning, but the delivery guys were going to call about 45 minutes out so that I’d have a good sense of their arrival. My plan was to wake up, get things disconnected and uninstalled, wait for their call, then unload the items from our refrigerator just before they arrived. Good plan, simple enough.


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