That weekend went by so fast! We did a lot of homebody stuff and stayed home this weekend other than a cafe outing and picking up stuff at the home improvement store 😀

The wallpaper is all down from the hallway and stairwell. We can almost taste the end of wallpaper in this house!  The plaster is in really good shape. Just a few holes from some screws, but that’s about it.

The walls got washed and we started putting the paint on. We moved the TV to the doorway so we could watch some football while painting:

Multitasking!

It’s so tempting to just rip the paper down in the last room to get it all off the walls, but we can wait. We haven’t decided what color the exercise room will end up being yet anyway.

Pixie was a major fail at her job this weekend, which is to keep the squirrels out of the birdfeeder:

Squirrels aren’t supposed to like safflower seeds, which they haven’t eaten before, but this squirrel seemed happy to eat them.

I was ready for the afternoon game. Supporting my Broncos with my nails:

That was a crazy nail biter of a game. Now the Broncos go on to the divisional championship!  I really, really wish they weren’t playing the Patriots, though. I am not sure the Broncos will win and I am so, so tired of the Patriots in the Superbowl. Anyway, it’s going to be interesting!

Not a lot going on to blog about really. Same old, same old. Same routines, mostly the same food. Lots of either oat bran or blintzes for breakfast:

Same old exercise of most walking on the treadmill, some biking on the trainer and actually some outside when it feels warm enough.

We have had snow. Most of the walks are clear, which is good, but the ones that aren’t after only a snowfall or two are really frustrating for what that means later on.  My little mushroom is peeking out from the snow here:

I used that for a prompt on my 365 photo group for “misplaced”. 😀

With fresh fallen snow and you can see the number of squirrels we have around here. 

I have a squirrel proof birdfeeder and it works really well, actually (Squirrel Buster). The squirrels mostly just come and eat the seed the birds spill out of it as you can see by all the prints centered under the feeder.

Jenny Lind progress taking place. The wood is 150+ years old, so I put wood conditioner on it before staining. It is soaking up the stain, too. This is one coat on the bottom part:

Two coats on the top. The slats are a walnut stain and the body of the trunk is Bombay Mahogany by Minwax. It has a beautiful red undertone.

I actually am using the Minwax polyshades with the polyurethane in it (like I did for the vanity), but I am going to coat the whole thing in satin finish after. I don’t want it shiny. I need to order some handle and get fabric for the inside liner. It’s starting to come together now!  With some crappy weather coming in tomorrow and a weekend of playoff football, I will be working on this in front of the TV 😀

(FYI, I know my blog layout is all weird. Not sure what is going on with it)

It’s definitely wintery around here now.  This is definitely not biking weather anymore.

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It makes me feel a little blah, though. The last couple of days I have felt like doing nothing at night other than vegging. Not typical of me, as you know.  This helps some:

All the pretty catalogs are arriving to look at and plan for the 2016 gardens. Lots of work to do on that front. We hope to put in a water feature and the other half of the front garden beds get shrub removal and new plantings. Gardening is never done, but that is part of the beauty of it.

Adding to the blah stuff is me needing a root canal. Over Christmas, I woke up in the middle of the night with sharp pain in my tooth. I thought maybe I had cracked a tooth since I do grind my teeth. It took a few days for the pain to subside. I knew I had a dental appointment in a couple weeks anyway, so I just waited to talk to him today. He said there isn’t anything else that would make you wake up with tooth pain other that root issues and there is a dark smudge on x-rays showing signs of root problems. While it isn’t urgent, he said the root canal will go much smoother and be pain free (yes, he really said that) if I wasn’t symptomatic when I had it done. He said when people had bad experiences with root canals it was either not good pain control during the procedure, which there was no excuse for, or that it was done while somebody was having swelling and inflammation, which makes pain harder to control.  He did say it was a boring procedure because it takes a while and you have your mouth open for a long time, but it’s not bad. Not sure I totally believe the no pain thing, but I won’t put it off. Our health insurance doesn’t cover dental, so that is a serious annoyance. I guess I had better buy a powerball ticket tomorrow 😀

Anyway, on a different note we have made the master cleaning list from the 2016 goal list.

It’s now been a couple weeks using this. One area per week. This doesn’t include just day to day stuff, only things that you don’t think about doing regularly. It will be interesting once we get around all the zones in about 6 weeks and come back to the first one. I will say that the house is really dusty.  😳 

Not to mention the hair ejecting machine:

I still love her, though.

Can you believe no one has won Powerball with all those millions of tickets sold? It’s crazy. Just shows how infinitesimal your odds are for winning. I did buy a ticket though. It’s fun to imagine what you would do with all the money and think about how it would change or what you wouldn’t want to change. One thing for sure if I won would be that I would stay anonymous. I would not let them say my name or have any pictures of me.  

I saw this in my FB feed and it makes me laugh:

It’s kind of sad how many people spend tons of money on tickets. The odds are so small that there is no point in buying more than one. And these are usually people who really can’t afford to drop $50 on lottery tickets.

One of those things I would do with even a fraction of that money would be to spare no expense to restore some of the stuff in Radiance Manor to original parts. We headed down to check out another architectural salvage place in Albany to see what they had.

It’s sort of a mixed blessing these places exist. It’s great to have this as a resource, but sad that some wonderful stuff has been torn out of old homes. Anyway, you know warehouses like this have to have a shop cat, which I made friends with right away, of course.

Right when we walked in, I saw the exact same sewing table that I got for our vanity:

Except it had some missing trim and the top has chunks out of it. Not to mention that it was $100.  I bought mine for $25 and I don’t think  the above one would have turned out as nice as ours :

Not-so-humble brag. 😳  Usually you find things cheaper after the fact, right? Funny how this time was the opposite. Yay me!

When we gut the master bath next year, my hope is to be able to get a clawfoot tub in there. I am not sure we will be able to get an old one like this or go with a new one. It all depends on size and whether or not we can get a cast iron tub up the stairs (although one came out in the past, so it must be possible). 

A couple of these tubs were in excellent shape and wouldn’t even need refinishing. We’ll have to see in a year what is available.

We do know that we can get replacement radiators here, which is pretty awesome, but hopefully that will never be needed.

Doors and windows galore!

We hunted around looking for the size door we need and I just don’t know if we are going to find a 29.5 inch door. It’s too custom. So, we will have to buy 30 and trim down – kinda scary. Again, that’s further in the future, but this place is a goldmine for that stuff.

Tons of door knobs. 

I kind of like the white enamel, but I have a thing for the crystal knobs, which they only had 1 left. Guess everyone else likes them, too.

This is a pretty awesome stove. If there was some way to modernize it and actually fit it into our kitchen LOL

We also hit up our usual suspects like Restore, but came home empty handed. Shopping salvage or thrift is like that. Many times you end up empty handed, but when you score, it’s usually good!

I haven’t done any project updating in a while.  Now that life has slowed down some, I have gotten to work on a few things. As you know we started removing wallpaper. This is what is coming down now (and what our niece has helped with).

As far as wallpaper goes, it actually isn’t that bad and was the least damaged in the house, so we left it for near the end. The hardest part will be the stairwell:

It goes up about 1.5 floors high, so we will have to get the ladder in to reach up top.  It’s going well so far and John has been working on it, too. He usually finds other projects to do when wallpaper is on the docket 😀

There has been trunk work as well. I have 2 in progress right now. I want to finish the Jenny Lind since that is for me. Then I have another one to hopefully sell. I won’t put too much into the other trunk because the condition isn’t all that great, but it will look decent enough.  I have gotten the Jenny down to the bare bones and sanded down. Now it’s ready to pretty back up.

I even used some deck cleaner on it to try to clean the wood, but unfortunately this trunk must have sat in the elements for a long time without its canvas covering because the wood is a grayish color and stained in spots, no matter how much sanding or cleaning. Of course, it is 150 years old, so we can cut it some slack!

I had wanted to just put polyurethane on it and keep the wood lighter, but since it is stained and discolored, I am going to stain it a darker mahogony and shine up the copper. I think that will look pretty nice. I will line this one with fabric as well and since it is my trunk, I can get whatever strikes my fancy!

I am also taking time for mental recharging with the coloring. John got me a coloring book for Christmas from the same author of Secret Garden.

Now I am coloring my little fishies!

In case you are wondering about the benefits of coloring, here is a good article on it. I highly recommend it!

I hope all of you have a safe and happy New Year!

 Thanks for reading my blog and joining my little space on the interwebs 😀

Merry Christmas to everyone! Have safe travels and spend quality time with those you love!

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I finally had a nice relaxing weekend. We actually woke up to a dusting of snow and a feeling more like Christmas.

I think John was trying to keep me out of the house on Saturday so I wouldn’t log into work 😀  We went out doing a little window shopping at noncrowded stores (antique stores and little boutiques) and some lunch at a new local restaurant called Jam ‘n Eggs.

Eggs benedict. Pretty good, not great. The service was excellent, though.

Festive deer. They are happy hunting season is over now.

I also had time to play with my camera. I was practicing with the bokeh effect, which is where you have a focal point and blurred background, which makes the lights look very pretty:

Then I cut some cardboard with a little heart shape on it to go over the lens to make the lights have a shape:

I don’t have a fixed lens so it gives it a bit of a fish eye, but still pretty cool!

We took my parents out driving around looking at lights. Is that called light peeping?  😀  Some people have the most amazing displays.

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That was just one house. I can’t imagine their light bill! The nice thing is that they have a box to collect canned food for the senior center. They get a lot of traffic, so I imagine they collect a lot.

Then there was this house, which we have been to before. You can walk around their property. They have interactive stuff and light shows set to music.

John and Mama Radiance:

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It was chilly and windy and now it feels like mid to late December! However, we are going to be back in the 50s this week and so there will be a little more riding!

A bit of randomness for a Thursday. Another quick ride today!  About 40 minutes.

It seems that will probably be the last ride until next week. It’s going to get colder and we might actually get snow on Saturday for the first time this season!

I got a nice surprise in the mail today. Well, I knew it was coming, but didn’t know how big it was! I did Alissa’s Thanksgiving 5K and won one of the drawings. This was the package that arrived today:

What a generous prize, too! Thanks Alissa! It’s like Christmas came early 😀

John won the football picks this week, so we headed out to dinner tonight. Pad thai with vegetables:

I almost always get curry when we eat thai food, so it was good to change things up.

Pixie is being good about not getting in the tree and just being under it, although sometimes she bites at the tree skirt – why I don’t know, but she’s a cat.

Getting into the holiday spirit! Remember the video last year of the family dinner? The pets are back as Santa’s elves this year!

Gotta love drone cat and the dog with the flask 😀

Do you ever have one of those starts to the week? I did. On Sunday night, I decided to get a good start for the week by doing overnight slow cooker pumpkin oats for weekday breakfasts. I put all the dry ingredients together, but wanted to wait for the milk, pumpkin and water until right before I went to bed and turned the crock pot on. So I did that and got up the next morning to serve breakfast and what do I see? The unopened can of pumpkin sitting there next to the crock pot! D’oh! How does one forget the most important ingredient of pumpkin oats? I ended up just stirring it and it was fine, but man I feel like I am losing it sometimes.

Can you believe we are still riding? This is crazy!  

I know it’s going to get chilly this weekend, but looking ahead to Christmas weekend and it’s supposed to be 50s.  It makes me wonder if it is actually possible to ride in January? Global warming.  I’m sure we will pay and pay hard for this later in the winter, though. The other thing with this warm weather is that I don’t expect Christmas to be next week. Eeeek!

Pixie seems to think it’s getting colder. She has been the lap queen when she isn’t sleeping on the radiators:

This is a little more unusual because Pixie wants my lap probably 95% of the time. Even if I have stuff in it and John’s is open. She knows who feeds her, I guess. I actually think it is because my lap is squishier and more comfortable 😀

I did get a better picture of the tree with the Rebel, too:

Still waiting to get that day off. Work has been pretty busy this week, so it hasn’t happened yet. Or I haven’t taken it yet, is what I should say. I need to just do it.  I was saying how this weekend I had no plans at all — at all — for the whole weekend. Then I started thinking of things I could do and John said, “like relax at the cafe, read a book, watch TV, pay attention to me”.  Since it doesn’t dawn on me to just relax! 😀  Those actually sound pretty good, though.