Groundhog's Day

It may be Leap Day, but today's post is for February's other claim to fame, in honor of Punxsutawney Phil. Last week, I was out in the backyard and saw this:

To be fair, we don't actually know what made the hole, or if anyone is living in there at the moment. We figured it was so broad and deep that it might even have another exit, though we haven't seen signs of any other such holes around the yard. For scale, here's a branch that we found laying nearby:

And here's the same branch, twisted around a corner until its entire length was underground. The hole clearly kept going after that, but switched back in a way that made it hard to find anything that would go through and give us an estimate of how long it went.

Hoping that we weren't going to trap anyone inside, we used a large portion of a bag of compost sitting in the shed to fill it in, trying to press it as much as possible. One week later, the hole hasn't come back.

I wonder who was setting up a home in our yard. I hope they're ok, but I also hope they go elsewhere. Heck, right next door is a giant empty lot just begging for a network of groundhogs/moles/bunnies.

Making it fit

As promised last time, I want to talk about the various loft and bunk beds we were considering, in the hopes that some of our discoveries prove helpful to readers one day.

Big Kid wanted "a bunk bed" but Little Kid didn't seem entirely convinced that she wanted to be on a lower bunk. Considering that she was just moving out of a crib with dropped sides, I felt like I wanted a bit more infrastructure for her anyway (most of the bunk beds had no edges on the bottom, so we would have had to put up an extra bed rail at minimum), plus we already had the blue bed, so it felt wasteful to me to get rid of it before two kids had had a go at it (even though we obviously would have passed it along and not trashed it). So a bunk or a single person loft bed were both options.

We knew we were going to keep the kids in one shared room and we were dealing with vaulted Cape Cod ceilings, making a full-height bed possible only in very limited places (all of which already had other high furniture against it). This almost automatically defaulted us to IKEA because most other stores only offered full-height beds. For example, Pottery Barn Kids makes absolutely GORGEOUS bunk and loft beds (some with a full staircase!) but they were all impossibly high for our ceilings.

We also had one long dresser that we wanted to keep in the room, and--given our room layout--everything had to fit along one wall. So we measured the existing dresser and blue bed and both baseboard heaters and realized that some beds simply would not work. Though they were all twin width, the frames themselves varied. We also had another frustrating problem--the ladder location mattered. Given the way the dresser was going to be pushed against the edge of the bed, it was quite possible that a ladder would be blocked by other furniture or a wall. This will make more sense when I show you the final picture:

You can see that the space tolerances were so close that in fact the dresser extended under the loft. Thank goodness the legs of the dresser are set back a few inches from the edge and thank goodness the heights all worked. So this quickly took bunk beds over 41'' wide out of the running as well. MYDAL, as minimalist as it was, was about a half inch too big:

TUFFING was a possibility. It was low and narrow and the centered ladder avoided some of the problems I just described. However, there were only a few uncomfortable-looking narrow metal bars supporting the mattress. And since the mattress could be no more than 5'' high (given how short the sides of the bed were), this suggested the bed would be pretty uncomfortable even for a tiny person.

 Compare that to the KURA we ended up purchasing, with much wider and more frequent slats:

Thanks to the KURA's shape (i.e. the fact that the dresser could partially sit within the bed frame), we knew it was the best choice. However, when we purchased it, we didn't think we could decide on where to put the ladder. All the product descriptions, in-store models, and catalogue pictures only show the ladder on the opposite side to where we have it in the picture. That would have forced us to put the bed on the left wall, which wasn't as good, since that wall is shorter (currently the blue bed is shorter than a standard twin, so it fits fine, but a twin would be longer than the wall). So imagine our happy surprise when, as I detailed last time, we opened the instruction manual to find that it was customizable. It was a challenge to find a good thin mattress--again the warnings stated that the mattress had to be under 5'' due to the low sides of the bed. But we ended up opting for a Linenspa model online rather than an Ikea one and it does the job even for a big person like me (we figured ANYTHING would be comfortable to someone who barely weighs 40 lb). Changing the sheets is a little complicated but at least this bed is short enough that it's not too bad.

You get a bed and you get a bed and you get a bed

Our Ikea surge continued a couple of months ago when we added yet another Swedish furniture addition to our house. This time, we added another bed to our collection and was one of the harder decisions that we've had to make when considering our options at Ikea (usually we do our research on the website and are in and out in possibly record time). Today I'll show you the building process and next time, discuss the pros and cons of each item we considered, so that maybe if you're considering similar items, you can find our research useful. Big kid wanted a "bunk bed" and after much consideration, we opted for the KURA. 

I don't want to boast that we've become really good at this, but I may have set a timer and completed the whole thing in about 100 minutes. Many of the negative reviews of this product are related to how hard it is to build. FALSE NEWS. Well, at least if you're like us and have dozens of Ikea products in your home (in fact, thinking this through has made me curious exactly how many Ikea products we've built over the years--I may do a future post on that very topic). So starting from "carrying the boxes upstairs" to "just have to add the sheets and pillows" was, for us at least, a pretty smooth process. The kids even "helped" (which really means it probably took longer than it needed to).

I guess I'll spend a few minutes on the details. First, as always with Ikea stuff, we skimmed the instructions. This bed can be built a few different ways, with the enclosed bed part as a loft, like this, or on the bottom. So we had to make sure we followed the relevant instructions. There was one other key part to the KURA that wasn't clear at the store and was a fabulous discovery to make once we started assembling--we could put the ladder on any side we wanted! This was great! In fact, as I'll discuss later, thinking that we could not do this was one reason that we were considering other options at the store.  It did means that we had to make sure we paid careful attention to the page number as we were building.

So here we go--lay out all the pieces and start looking for the first ones we need.

A drill with a hex set is really key to staying sane. Those little hand cranks only lead to cramped hands, un-tightened screws, and angry people.

In the case of KURA, the mattress slats (of which there are many) are held in place with a track that involved drilling many many screws into the frame. Again, we could not have done this quickly and sanely without a drill. We learned also that a battery-operated drill is helpful so that you're not tethered to an electrical cord.

Ta-dah! Several months later, the Big Kid loves it and the Little Kid loves having the blue bed as a hand-me-down. It took some creative planning (again, more on that later) to make sure it could all fit where it needed to, but we couldn't be happier. Plus the KURA is low enough that we parents can easily reach in and assist when needed (and make the bed--I truly have no idea how I would change the sheets on a full-height bunk bed). Big Kid is a Big Kid but she still needs plenty of snuggles, late-night drinks, or trips to the bathroom. I'd say something like "we're now all sleeping on Ikea beds" but we already have been for years! It's just that one of them was a crib, until now.

More next time on why we chose the bed we did and maybe a quick tally of all our Ikea builds over the years. I feel like we should start charging royalties!

Another Ikea Addition

The big linen closet project had some nice follow-on effects. The contents of this trunk in the office, my yarn stash, relocated to some plastic boxes in the upstairs closet. It's a bit hard to access but perfect for how often I need to get there (plus it let me sort everything into smaller categories like yarn weight). It also stopped me from cursing out the messy children each time I had to get in the trunk and was stopped by the mess on top. It wasn't really a crafting surface, but of course, EVERYTHING is a crafting surface. So we moved the contents of the trunk and put the trunk itself away and decided what to do with our newfound space.

We knew we needed a space for crafts/art (see above comment) and we had lots of small things to store, specifically blocks and OH SO MANY LEGOS. We figured we'd stick to the rainbow decor (also known as "I've given up and decided to let my kids dictate my decorating") and purchased a TROFAST from--where else--our favorite store, Ikea. We went with the white since our room colors are a dusty gray brown from an old Hemnes line (yes, also Ikea), a white STUVA (Ikea) and D's white and bamboo standing desk. Yellow pine wasn't really the look we wanted. And of course, we went with rainbow drawers.

Building the pieces was the easy part. Sorting the Legos by color, now that took time. By the time we were finished, these bins were mostly full.

I like how it came out. Let's see how long the organization lasts.

Decorations in Review

Though the holiday season is a thing of the past, I couldn't resist a chance to document our decorations for the blog--and for my own reference--before I took them down last weekend. Each year with the encouragement of our little ones, we keep upping the game. This year, we brought out all our normal favorites and added a few sets of lights as well. We stuck to our candy cane and ornament theme, adding some hand-me-down candy cane ornaments to our crepe myrtle and lighting up our path with little candy canes. Larger candy canes that used to light up but no longer do edge our front garden. We have all-weather large ornaments in a bunch of trees and on our lamppost. Finally, our matching wreathes (along with a matching door wreath that I'd already swapped for our standard winter snowflake) are holding up pretty well too. D went up on the ladder to string up our icicles, making that the most time-consuming part of decorating.

I failed to manage a night picture this year but imagine last year's look but with the addition of three more sets of lights. And because I struggle every year to remember what I bought the previous year, I took a picture of this year's new light (as our holiday collection continues to grow). I'm always surprised how a new set of lights will look totally different despite my best efforts at matching. I'm sure that the same set won't exist next year, but hopefully I'll be able to find something similar if we decide yet again that we want to add more.

Indoors looked much the same as always, though we went for silver rather than red garland on the tree (I know, we are SUCH rebels).

The only thing missing was some winter weather, but there are a couple more months to remedy that. I hope you had a happy everything, whatever your chosen holiday.

"Turn on Christmas"

We have jumped on the "smart" home bandwagon. Is it a bandwagon? I don't know. But we have some smart plugs and some connected speakers (which we will discuss in a future post), thanks to the power of buying stuff.

Why are we risking opening our home to hackers (as they say the "S" in IoT is for security)? Well, because 1. turning on the Christmas tree lights is REALLY REALLY hard and 2. we wanted to have synced music across the house.

Do you see the plug? It's there....

We are an Apple household, so that means we already own an Apple TV. It also can serve as a home automation hub - functionally that means that it serves as a intermediary that puts all of the smart widgets in one application.

What are the smart widgets? We have two Wemo Mini Smart plugs, one powering the Christmas tree and the other powering the dining room sideboard lights. It was a HUGE pain getting these smart plugs recognized by Apple's "Home" app. Apparently contemporary versions of these plugs have a "HomeKit" barcode which you can scan and connect with immediately. I guess our local Target sells these so infrequently that we ended up with a really old version that pre-dates HomeKit compatibility.

I had to install a "Wemo" app, connect to the smart plugs, install a firmware update, wait 12+ hours for someone or something to generate a HomeKit code, then (while my iPhone was on the exact same network as the smart plug) type the HomeKit code into the Apple "Home" app. I wasted a HUGE amount of time initially because I connected the smart plugs to our "guest" network, which is more secure since it doesn't have access to any devices on our home network. But that was a little too secure as the smart plugs couldn't see the Apple TV it needed to sync with. Oops.

Anyways, once I got that all sorted out we could see our two plugs on our Apple "Home" app. I set up a "scene" that automatically turns on "Christmas" (both smart plugs go from "off" to "on") whenever either of us returns home after sunset.

As the smart plugs also supported the Alexa Smart Home system, I also digitally hooked the plugs into our Alexa (fortunately being on one smart home system does not preclude being on another). So we can also activate/deactivate both plugs simultaneously by saying "Alexa, turn on Christmas" and "Alexa, turn off Christmas."

Practically this means that we have the tree and sideboard on MUCH more now, which makes for a much more festive home. (When you have to lean over a wobbly lamp and reach though a scratchy tree covered in precariously placed glass ornaments to turn something on - you don't do it much.)

Winter-Ready Playground

At two-year's old, the kids' playground was starting to show its age. It's holding up very well and remains a sturdy, amusing addition to our backyard. But the roof and a few other surfaces had lost their finish in a way that made us worry that it was bad for the wood.

After a little research, we opted to use a spray can of Olympic Waterguard seal, rather than the paint-on polyurethane or deck stain. We weren't trying to do anything too dramatic, just protect it from the weather and give it back a little of its cedar color.

D grabbed the ladder and started lightly sanding the damaged surfaces on a rare weekend day this fall that looked like it would stay dry for a few hours.

It took really minimal prep work, compared to a more dramatic refinish. The results were pretty much immediate. This is beam on the other side of the set. The left picture is the "before," and the right is "after." The color was a bit redder than we expected, but it does seem to be blending in ok to our...let's call it "aged cedar."

Here is the roof, after the treatment. You can see it's a little redder than the untreated places, like the vertical wall below it, but it no longer has that scaley, weathered look that made me think it would become susceptible to rot. Besides the annoyance of having to wait for a dry, not-too-windy day and of having to bring out the ladder, this project took minimal work. For once, a job that took exactly as much effort as we though (maybe even less!). And we have enough sealer in the can that we can probably do it next year with no new supplies needed. Our playground is winter-ready!

Giant Dust Rabbits

A whopping 10 years ago, I wrote about various strategies to hunt dust bunnies. The kind of bunnies I hadn't accounted for were the hidden, lurking kinds. A few months ago when we flipped our mattress, we discovered an entire warren of dust bunnies. They were so big, I'd like to think of them as dust Flemish Giant rabbits. These must have have been growing under our bed for...years? Our bunny warren was lurking underneath the drawers in our bed frame, which meant we had to open the drawers and pull up the bed slats to see them. I guess that's why we hadn't noticed even when we flipped the mattress other times--it was just luck that one bunny was visible enough to prompt us to explore further. The sight was so gross that I forgot to take a picture before grabbing the vacuum, so the pictures below show much less dust than we originally found.

Thankfully, with a little awkward hopping over the drawers and between the frames, we were able to vacuum up most of the bunnies and wipe down the floors with a damp cloths.

Knowing this has been under our bed for who-knows-how-long is gross, but at least now we know to attack this space every time we remember to flip the mattress. I wonder what other hidden dust warrens are lurking in our house. Most of our furniture is up on legs to help our baseboard heaters be more effective, so usually we can see (and clean) under them. So I hope that while we definitely collect some dust along our baseboards, we don't have quite the giant dust bunnies found here in too many unknown warrens around the house. Because EWWWWW!

It's been a bit quiet around here lately but stay tuned for a few posts we have lined up. We might not be blogging but we're busy around the house, as always.

The Closet Big Reveal

At long last, time for the culminating closet post. You've been very patient as I've struggled to find time to blog (and I'm only getting to it today thanks to a sick day; such is the life of a parent). So to review, we left off with the space painted and ready to go, literally about 6 months after I'd started taking apart the old shelving and begun to spackle and years since we'd wanted to do something with that unorganized black hole of a linen closet. Back in 2016, we paid to have a professional organizer from the Container Store come and give us advice. After a bunch of back and forth (and some successes in other rooms like our kitchen and office), we had the start of a plan for the upstairs linen closet. But we weren't convinced or ready to pull the trigger, so it sat for, well, apparently 2.5 years.

The idea was that instead of using a system mounted to the wall in such a narrow space impeded by ducts, we opt instead for something on wheel that could be entirely wheeled out when needed, to access the things in the back. If you could look from the ceiling, it looked something like this (the gray areas are the vent ducts, the white with Xs in them are the modular shelves):

If you could stand at the ducts on the right and look at the left wall, it would be something like this. Notice that they are all on wheels so that they can be totally pulled out of the closet?

The system, called InterMetro, came in all heights (the poles could even be custom cut) and several widths and depths. We altered the plans a bit when it finally came time to buy, choosing to use two sets of shelves instead of one, so that wheeling them out would be easier. We ended up with a 24'' and a 36'' set of shelves, both at the narrower 14'' depth. They are 72'' high, plus the 3'' or so of the wheels, and just clear the door to be rolled out in the hallway.

Assembly wasn't too bad except for a couple key points. The first was that these stickers, on each and every pole (of which there were 8) were incredibly sticky and took an enormous amount of elbow grease and Goo-gone to remove. Not cool, Container Store. For the prices we paid for this, they could have used something that didn't leave a disgusting residue.

The second thing was that the clips that lock the shelves into place at their desired heights are not nearly as secure as advertised. Once everything was in place, I don't think they will shimmy. But because the locking mechanism could wiggle as you wedge the shelf into place, the shelves are all just slightly off from level. Again, I think, given the price, that the Container Store could have done better.

There was also the added stress of deciding it would be "no big deal" to assemble one of them downstairs while our littlest napped and then carry it up. It turned out that it was exactly just too big to clear the turn into the stairwell and make it up. We got a nice nick in the wall on the stairs thanks to that stunt. Oops.

You'll notice that we also used metal ventilation taping to close off the gap on the right between the duct and the wall, in an effort to mask the fact that there was no way I was able to paint behind there.

The icing on the cake for this simple shelving solution was returning to an old favorite, elfa, for the door. We've used the elfa system in our office closet and living room and the ingenious door storage is something we probably ought to add everywhere. It's now the home to all the medicines and first aid things we've kept in our downstairs closet, sorted by type (cold, pain, topical creams, bandages, etc.). This frees up a ton of space in our downstairs closet to put the kids bathtubs away.

In all, we really couldn't be happier. We now have a place for our linens, pillows, and out-of-season blankets, the content of our medicine cabinet, and some other various things (my yarn stash! extra toothpaste, floss, and toilet paper that used to send us running to the basement!).

It took 3 years, but at least it's lovely to behold now.

Finally Painted and Ready

With more than enough paint finally at hand (the original quart plus one gallon), it was time to get down to business. Fortunately, despite the prominent "NOT RETURNABLE" on the can, Home Depot took back the incorrect color and gave us our money back. Still though, whoever thought having Foxglove and Foxgloves should be fired...

As I mentioned last time, this was my first time getting to roll the paint. And not just roll. This was a one-woman job. I cut in and then rolled each wall, hoping to get the paint in place relatively promptly to avoid any weird blending lines. D was here for moral support and picture taking. The children were here for complaining that they wanted to help and then not wanting to actually help (they did paint a bit, but only in the space that eventually was going to be rolled over, to their dismay). You can see their handiwork along the side walls in the second picture:

And within a few hours, it was done! It involved some contortionist moves in the corner near the ductwork, but ultimately, a pretty rewarding and quick job.

But of course, it is never *that* quick. I still had to do the trim and the door, a boring necessity to make it all look white and new. Despite my annoyance at painting glossy trim, I did get a brief thrill when I realized that this may be the last odd custard color left in the house that was so prevalent when we bought it. Begone, yellow!

Next up, with D's help, was to replace this exposed CFL light. Part of me wanted style, the same out-of-place flair that we applied to our bedroom closet. The rest of me just wanted a covered lightbulb so that I didn't risk shattering it and spilling all kinds of hazardous materials all over our sheets and towels.

We agreed that I could finally get something similar to the crystal chandelier I had wanted in the dining room. Because why not? We found a cute one at Target and considered whether or not we could add the pull chain just as we had done in the bedroom. When it arrived though, I realized that even though it was a flush mount, it would occupy too much real estate near the ceiling where we wanted to put some tall shelves. No problem. We used this as an excuse to upgrade our guest bedroom light (that we inherited from the previous owners) and put that light in the closet. Here's the original ceiling light. Not bad, but pretty blah:

 Here's the new crystal one in its place:

And here's our closet! It's not quite as swanky as I wanted, but it's much safer now that there are no exposed bulbs and this swap let us put the crystal light where we can appreciate it more.

Last in the closet series, a post where I'll finally tell you what we ended up doing with this space, now that it was painted and ready for use.

The Rules of Painting

Continuing on our closet adventure, we reach the fun part. After months of taking down hardware,  spackling, sanding, and caulking, it was time to paint! Painting, while not the most enjoyable activity, is for me one of my favorite home improvements because the drama is immediate. The whole space changes within just a day or two.

Step one, not pictured, was to paint the ceiling. After not painting for several years, I forgot our painter rule #1: use good tools. I started out using no tools at all. As I started gathering up our painting tools, scattered around our basement since our last paint job almost three years ago, I realized that our paint roller tray was covered in rust. Probably not a good thing to ix paint in. I also couldn't find any stirrers or paint can openers, even though I knew we had many lying around. So we sent a runner to the store and ended up with a paint tray that came with rollers and brushes. I should know better. I do know better. But it was so temping to just open the kit and go. So rather than use my much better Purdy brushes and rollers, I used the cheap ones that came in the kit. Big mistake.

It probably isn't noticeable to anyone but me, but the ceiling (my first foray into painting for years) looks too textured now, because the roller nap was cheap and a bad fit for our smooth ceiling. But hey, it's a ceiling and it is now white rather than light yellow. And after I pulled yet another brush bristle off the edges where I was cutting in, I finally remembered to seek out our good brushes and dump that one in the craft bin for the kids.

Another fun side note about this project--this is literally the first time I've ever used a paint roller. Yes it's true. After painting an apartment and then a whole house, this is--to my knowledge--the only time I haven't been just the "cutting in" person. D has always done the rolling (see examples here, here, and here.) Since this has always been "my" project, I did it all. And so, ladies and gentleman, after about 15 years of painting, I felt the reward of rolling. (Seriously, it's so much more fun. I'm not being sarcastic here at all. All that painful cutting in for such small payoff and then roll and BAM, new look.) So first, the ceiling. A lot less fun and a lot less payoff than the walls, but it was a start (moving from vaguely yellow to slightly-too-bumpy white--not quite the drama I was looking for).

Then it was on to the REAL painting. I already knew that I wanted a color, despite this being a closet (I have a history here--see my lovely aqua walk-in bedroom closet). I thought I would go for a super light, almost-white purple. Here were the swatches we selected from Home Depot.

Do you have a favorite? Here's where we broke painter rule #2: don't let a kindergartner pick your color. I would probably have picked the one on the lower right or any of the pale ones along the left. But those were too light for my kid, who'd come to the store with me with promises that she could select the color with minimal parental veto. So she chose Foxglove, on the back right. It was on the same scale as the one I preferred just below it--just one notch darker. Her sad little face when I tried to convince her to go lighter made me relent. Foxglove it was.

Then I broke painter rule #3: buy all the paint you need. I somehow believed that one quart would be enough for such a small closet, especially when I saw how expensive the paint base was. And so we came home with one quart of paint. I thought I was ready to go. Then we did some math for square feet of wall space vs. what the can said it could cover. Suddenly we weren't sure. And I definitely did not want to run the risk of having to buy a second can when halfway complete, given that dye lots aren't always consistent and I might not be able to just start on a second can seamlessly.

So armed with a picture of the first can, Grandma went to the store to buy a second can before we started (that way we could mix the paint before beginning, to even out any color inconsistency). What did the paint department employee send her home with? Take a good look and see if you can spot the problem:

Apparently Behr paint comes in Foxglove and Foxgloves. Both valid colors for their Marquee line, both purplish (i.e. not particularly noticeable if you're not paying attention) and both very different. In addition, Foxglove (no "s") had a one-coat guarantee but Foxgloves (with the "s") did not. We discovered this difference, of course, roller and brush in hand, dressed in paint clothes and ready to go. *Big sigh.* It was off to the store again.

To be continued...