EXTERMINATE!!!!!

Like the Daleks, can you really destroy English Ivy? Well, yes you can. But if you tolerate it near your house it will continually attempt to overtake it. 

Eventually we will remove all of the ivy, but it is useful to to hold our soil in place until we have a better plan.

So every year we need to rip it off of our walls. 

Tiffany's, but no little blue box

Check one off the list - our office has a beautiful new light fixture. Bonus points because the wiring up there wasn't all that scary (old houses always make the smallest upgrades into a suspenseful thriller, because there's no telling what's waiting - especially with electrical work). Step one was to find a lamp that we liked. It would be easy, we thought, to replace the ugly generic lamp that was there when we bought the house. I realized I never took a picture of the old fixture, even looking way back in the blog archives. Well here it is, sitting on our table, ready to be retired:

After at least 20 minutes of searching at stores like Crate and Barrel, West Elm, Pier 1, and World Market, we realized it might be a difficult thing to find. We wanted the bulbs to be covered and we wanted something interesting that also actually produced light (as opposed to mood lighting that wouldn't actually illuminate the room). Fortunately we went back to the basics and found one semi-flushmount light at Lowes. D remarked: "that looks kinda nice," I agreed, and 5 minutes later it was ordered for local in-store pick-up. We were all in favor of quick, decisive action.

The next afternoon, we picked up the fixture and by that night, had it installed. No sense in letting it sit around.

The instructions were actually so misleading that we quickly went off-book (seriously, it had the step about putting the decorative plate on before even attaching the base to the ceiling, it made no sense. Step one was actually tricky - threading all 3 wires through the tube and the nut was a very tight fit.

The other problem we ran into was that the electric box on the ceiling was a circle that was plastered in place and protruded a little, which stopped us from getting the new fixture flush with the ceiling. The decorative nuts did not allow us to tighten it enough even to get it to stop wiggling. D ingeniously added an extra nut to let us tighten the fixture. You can see it's still not totally flush to the ceiling, but it is flush to the electrical box and is much more stable now. Of course we notice it, but no one else ever will. And probably in a few days we won't either. It looks much better now - at first D used a rusty nut but when we realized how visible it was, he found one in a matching brushed nickel finish.

Fortunately those were our only complications. The wires, mercifully, were not too surprising. Old and cloth-covered, yes, but at least there was a white and a black and everything went back into place. And so without further ado, here is the newest addition to our home decor - the Portfolio 13-in Tiffany Style lamp:

And thankfully, it does what it was supposed to and fit the new LED bulbs wonderfully. Here it is illuminated:

We love it and our only regrets are that we don't use the room more often and that we didn't replace it sooner. Might be time to replace the kitchen lamp as well. It's ok, but now it seems awfully boring.

Random question before I sign off - we're shopping around for faucets for the bathroom and wondered if anyone knew what brands are good and what to steer clear of. We were mostly looking at Kohler and Moen because we thought they were well-made. Delta has some pretty ones, but we've never used them before. Suggestions? The only thing we do know from the bathroom remodel was to buy them from fancier places, because the versions sold by Lowes and Home Depot tend to use cheaper plastic parts. Someone recommended faucet.com because we don't have anywhere convenient to shop in person.

So Much To Do, So Little Time

In the last post I mentioned a growing to-do list. Though I usually post our to-do lists around our home-buying anniversary, I thought I'd share with you some of the things I'd like to work on while it's fresh in my head. So here is the list, one month early- nothing major (the windows were our major planned fix for the year) but we definitely need to do some upkeep. Here they are in approximate order of importance/likelihood of getting done:

• Repaint the coffee table. Now that the rug is red, we have to make the table blue so it does clash in a weird, kind-of-matches-but-doesn't way.

• Clean out the dryer vent. It's been over 3 years, yikes!

• Mix up some quikrete to treat some loose areas in our stone walkway
  

• Stop the drip in our main bathroom sink. It's driving me crazy. We leave a contained underneath and use the water for our houseplants, but it is so annoying - especially because this is the sink that guests use and the container above the drain stops air from getting to the drain so it is always damp and moldy. I think this will require a new faucet, but we want to get one from a better store than a Home Depot or Lowes (even though they have the same brands as fancy stores, the parts are cheaper - i.e. plastic instead of ceramic) and we haven't had time to look into where to go or what to buy. I'm especially looking forward to having hot and cold knobs that are oriented correctly (they should point parallel to the faucet when they are on, not when they are off).

• Some light fixture updates: we switched the bulbs in our office to LEDs but they are too big now for the old fixture. We didn't like it anyway...
  

• Power wash the siding (we have no excuses - my parents loaned/gave us their power washer).

• Replace the outside lights - the one at the end of the walkway (now that it works, yay!), the one beside the front door, and the one over the garage (which we never ever use). They are the cheapest, most standard looking ones available and I'd really like to buy fancy ones. (You know what are really cool? The gas lamp ones. Of course we don't actually have a gas line to the house, so those are not an option.)

• Make the basement pretty. This is a big project that involves replacing our pantry shelves with something that nice (like these Fjalkinge shelves by Ikea), painting the wall that the fireplace is on, which still has a spot of bare drywall from our furnace woes three years ago, and maybe buying some spiffy new furniture (I would love to get rid of our college futon but still have a place for people to sleep).

• Door replacements, eventually. Last year I said one of the priorities for this year would be a new basement door and new doorways for the hallway.

How much can we realistically get done with a little one around the house just starting to be mobile and curious? Probably not much. But one can always hope.

Clever packaging

Lowes has some pretty clever packaging. I was confused when this arrived - wondered if it was some weird brand logo.

 But then this box showed up (baby for scale) - a castle?

Yes! A castle! Because who doesn't love to have make-believe adventures using large shipping boxes. I remember some of my best childhood memories are from the time when my parents bought a chest freezer and I made a house out of the giant box.

 If you can't see it clearly, it says "Lords, knights, ladies - the royal family doth summon thee to the palace, forthwith. Yea, verily! Just as King Arthur pulled the sword from the stone, freest thou the castle from this box to create thine own cardboard Camelot. Wield thy sword with care so that no wound may befall thy fair skin." At the top of the box, it says "THANK YOU. We hope you enjoy your order as much as your box."

What was in the boxes? An outdoor rug for our patio and a large flower pot, both from the parents.

They bought us the flower pot in order to make an umbrella stand but we are far too lazy and instead, are keeping an eye on a pretty cantilever one from Home Depot in the hopes that it goes on sale as the season comes to an end (sorry Lowes, you have cute packaging but don't make a model that we like).

It worked out well though, because we've been slowly increasing the pot size for a willow branch that we planted. It's getting bigger and bigger and we hope that if it survives the winter on our windowsill, it will find a permanent home next spring when we plant it outside.

You may have noticed some sticks on our table in the above picture of our patio? What is it? A sawed-off mulberry tree! After we got some help identifying the second of two baby trees growing in our yard, we decided the tulip tree was the winner and cut the mulberry off. We still have to cut it down further. Seemed like the remains will make decent kindling.

A few more gratuitous yard pictures - our lilies and black-eyed susans are very happy (finally!). This fall we have to actually thin out our garden. I can't believe it!

The weather has just been too nice to do much work lately. We've been out enjoying ourselves. The blog will pick back up soon - we have a growing to-do list.