Time to Clean Those Pearly Whites

No, this hasn't suddenly become a blog about dentistry. But just like my teeth get dingy (I'm an avid tea-drinker) and need professional cleanings twice a year, I think my porcelain sink is crying out for help. With so much contradictory advice on the Internet, I thought I'd turn to my readers.

My current sink-cleaning routine involves daily scrubbing with a regular soft sponge and Soft Scrub with Baking Soda. It does a pretty good job to convince me that there are no more icky residues to attract creepy crawlies. It removes some stain if I use a lot of elbow grease. However, staining and other gunk must have built up over time because now no matter how much scrubbing I do, the bottom looks gross:

Time for the toothbrush?

What do you use to get rid of stains in your porcelain sink (or, if you have stainless, any general advice would be useful). The web suggests varied solutions like lemons, vinegar, toothpaste (see, there's the connection to teeth), bleach (but others say that bleach will definitely ruin my sink!), alum, and baking soda. They also differ on what kind of sponge to use (I'd like to use something with a little built-in abrasion, but don't want to do permanent damage).

Help!

((Also another request to the five of you still reading my blog--I sometimes feel like I'm sending these posts into the ether and that nobody is there to read them. I keep this blog as a record for myself but also because it's fun to share my rather mundane life with others. If you're out there, please leave me a comment, even if it's just an anonymous "hello."))

Potential

I have two upcoming projects that I want to consult with you, my reading public, about. The first and simpler one, concerns chairs.

We were lucky enough to find two used chairs for sale that looked like they were made for our bedroom. In fact, they match so well it's a little spooky. The first doesn't need any work whatsoever. D has been using it for a night table since we have yet to find ones we like:

The second one, which one kitty seems to have adopted as his new favorite chair, is beautiful, but has traditional dark wood legs that don't go with our furniture at all:

Project one is to fix that. (I know I know, we are possibly going to ruin a beautiful heirloom wing-back chair. But I promise it will look nice...) I understand the principles of painting wood though I haven't really tried it. We are going to sand the legs, prime them, and paint them with the blue paint we used in the closet. Then lightly sand again to get a more distressed look. At least that's the plan so far. We won't be getting to it until probably early June, which gives you plenty of time to provide your input. Leave us comments, please!

Project two is to build a craft area for me. Now that we're about to clear some space in the office, I have a free wall and plan to use it to store all of my random artsy things--mostly yarn and knitting needles but also residual products from past hobbies like beads, colored pencils, paints, charcoal, and stamp pads. (The wall in question is still a mess so no pictures yet.) This page has a lot of good suggestions but I want more! Since all of the furniture in the office is "antique stain" finished Ikea pine, I'd prefer to keep it that way (well, except for my steamer trunk of yarn--gotta keep the moths out). I'm leaning towards buying this piece, since it has so many cubbies:

I thought I might put the steamer trunk on top of a bench or media center that is flat on top but has drawers on the bottom, for additional storage. Again, ideas are welcome!

More of the Same

Still working on the bedroom and still really loving how it is turning out. The blues and greens are as soothing as I hoped they'd be and the Ikea Erfjord natural latex mattress is surprisingly comfortable. Here are many gratuitous pictures (and a reminder of it's previous state):

Let's see, what's worth a mention. Both the dressers are Craig's List finds (moving them, especially the massive white one, was not so fun). The rug is Ikea's Flokati (100% unspun wool). It feels absolutely heavenly in the morning on my bare feet. The reading lamp is Ikea too, as is the comforter (which is actually a long story for another post). The comforter cover is Pottery Barn's Sydney Palampore organic cotton duvet. The stars, which are in most major room in our house, are an old find from an Asian gift shop.

The closet is a pretty blue that I found for $5 at Home Depot. I think we'll be using it on the dark wood legs of a chair we might be picking up this week, to help it blend into the decor. I am absolutely thrilled that all of our clothes and shoes fit in one closet. That has never happened before.

We continue to make big strides on finishing this room off. The curtains I ordered should arrive later this week and we have plans for additional furniture and wall decor. Stay tuned!

And on a completely different note, I just have to document that I was actually able to grow violets. Not just keep the greenery alive but actually get flowers where there were none. This is so amazing for me, a complete black thumb. Mind you it's not like I did anything special. Just water it and keep it in the kitchen window:

Just an Ordinary Monday

This Monday found us in a cage match with one very large, heavy latex mattress. We bought it at Ikea 10 minutes before the store closed and struggled to figure out how to get it home. We were not particularly prepared, because we assumed that like all Ikea projects, it would be rolled up or smooshed and very portable.

We couldn't have been more wrong. Even though we got a latex mattress and not a spring one, it came in its final size in a flimsy cardboard box and weighed about 110 pounds. The mattress itself was so floppy and dense that it was difficult to maneuver. D thought we would be able to fold it in half and shove it into his hatchback, but I worried that once it was out of the box (but still wrapped in plastic), we would discover that it would not actually fit in the car and that it wouldn't be able to get back in the box.

By now the store was about to close and we had to decide if we needed to return it then and there and take on the challenge another day or somehow get it home. Delivery fees had never looked so welcoming.

But with a little rope and really minimal knowledge of knot-tying (and a short, slow drive home), this was how we arrived back at our house:

Getting it into the house and up the stairs, especially once the cardboard gave way to a dense lump of foam, was another challenge. Pushing on foam does pretty much nothing except compress the foam. We had to pull it everywhere, but without ripping any of the cover. By the time we got it onto the bed frame, we were exhausted--but too sweaty to collapse on the mattress.

We officially try it out this Friday night. In a meantime we are amassing random bedding needs: a comforter, a duvet cover, clips to hold the cover in place, mattress pads, and decorative pillows.


The mattress can be exchanged within 90 days if we don't like it. After our exciting evening, we are pretty sure that this is a scam, and that mattresses are made deliberately heavy and awkward to help "convince" people that the mattress is great. I don't think you could pay me to haul that thing back out to the car...

Gutters Where They Belong

I came home on Thursday to this:

All 45 feet of 6 inch seamless aluminum gutter, just sitting in our front yard:

Fortunately, the following day I was greeted by this sight:

Gutters! Back where they should be under our roof. In the end, we went with a local roof and gutter guy who gave us an amazingly good price that included replacing two cracked shingles. He didn't suggest capping our fascia, like one of the other guys did, and was even able to reuse all our gutter guards, which were just lying in the yard where they had fallen. We can see why this repairman is a local favorite.

And now our attention is turned to other things that are unfortunately very expensive. Our purchasing "to-do" list includes an energy audit, a tree assessment, dressers, mattress, curtains and hardware, and possibly a second bed so that we can have a double-layer bed frame. But today we had to reprioritize when we noticed that our basement windows were steamed up from a sudden heat wave. And so we bought this bad boy:

For once I decided not to research a purchase to death and just buy the number one-rated dehumidifier on Amazon. I figured if everyone else liked it, so would we. It has a tube we can run down to our drain and apparently works well, so hopefully that will help keep our basement a little dryer.

Owning a house is expensive! But at least we are still having fun.