Another unwelcome present

I mentioned on Monday that we planned to let the cats into our breezeway to scare away mice with their scent and presence. Little did I know how effective their presence would actually be. Last night after work we let our cats out. One wanted to come in immediately but the other, more of a hunter, decided to hang around. Five minutes later we heard some noises and then got this little show outside the door to our kitchen:

 He could not understand why we wouldn't open the door and let him in to show off his prize:

It took a little work getting him to drop the mouse (we had to sneak in from a different door and tempt him with lots of treats) but he finally let go. He was so proud of himself the rest of the evening. We were proud of him too, though a little disgusted.

Not exactly the humane trap we planned, but it sure worked...

Unwelcome Presents

There's no "before" picture, but trust me when I say that our breezeway has turned into a disgusting mess over the last few months. It held all our gardening supplies and soils; our lawn furniture; the cooler that we were too lazy to carry into the garage; some wood stain, sponges, and rags I was too lazy to put back in the basement; a dismantled tent; and various other things that didn't belong there.

With our appraisal date approaching, we realized that the room would look a lot more impressive (impressive=valuable) if we cleaned it out and made it look more like a, well, room.

We started clearing out the furniture and putting the messes away. There was a lot of dirt on the ground, which wasn't too strange since this room is almost just as much outside as in and because we work in there when filling up our potted plants. So we got out the push broom to sweep it away. Until we noticed that it wasn't dirt...It was mouse poop! It seemed we had one or more long-term residents in our breezeway, perhaps cousins to this poor little guy. Again, this room isn't exactly inside and the presence of mice doesn't answer the question of how one got into the house, but it was still horrible, nasty gross.

When we really started to look around once we realized it was poop, we noticed it everywhere. I couldn't believe we'd let this room get so disgusting.

Fast forward a few hours (and then again a few days later)--lots and lots of Clorox wipe downs on every major surface and then several rounds of bleach and water on the floor.

We wore masks and gloves and did the best we could to remove any trace of mice. More importantly, we cleared away all the junk and made the place a lot less welcoming, with fewer places to hide.

We also noticed a few stray hooks on the ceiling and so we got to bring our cute little lanterns out of hiding and hang them up inside, since we're not putting the tent up this year.

Our best strategy right now for keeping mice out? Making the place smell like cats (cat perfume...ew...). No, but seriously, we hadn't let the cats out into this room since it had gotten too cluttered and dirty. But now that it is cleaned and disinfected, we're letting them out to play and sniff around. We're hoping that their scent (and occasional presence) will keep the mice from making any permanent homes.

Best of all, after all the work we put in to making this room look neat and tidy, our appraiser complimented us on it. He commented that most times he's come across 3-season rooms like this, they've been used for storage and look messy and cluttered, and seemed pleasantly surprised to see that ours was a nice space to relax with chairs and tables. If he only knew what it looked like one week earlier...

Wacky Wiring, Fabulous Friends

It's inevitable that a house built in the 1950s is going to have some electrical quirks. Old wiring plus years of owners jerry-rigging new outlets and switches are bound to cause some headaches. Our first clue that something wasn't right in the extra bedroom was last year when we were getting insulation blown into the attic and have to call in an electrician to find a splice before we sealed everything up. The electrician stopped the problem but told us to throw out the lamp and light switch, since they were old and partly causing the problems. So for over a year we had an electrical box with capped wires poking out from the ceiling. It was a mostly unused room and when I worked in there to refinish furniture, I just brought in a standing lamp. Recently we decided to refinance and decided that we had to get a lamp up there before the appraiser came to judge us (the refinance itself is another story for another time). We took for granted that everything was in working order and all we needed to do was to install a new lamp. We had plenty of practice at this, like in our dining room, bathroom, and bedroom.

We had a cute little sun lamp, Smila Sol, from Ikea (yes, it's a kid's lamp, so what?) and it was pretty straightforward to install, though, as usual, it's more of a two-person job than something to do alone. We got it ready to go, put the bulbs in, switched the circuit back on and....

Nada. No light at all. We realized then that we'd never tested the electricity with a volt meter before assembling everything. Back down goes the lamp and off went the circuit and then we took a good look at the wiring in the box. We noticed a lot of stuff that didn't look right, even to the amateurs we are. Whites to blacks in several places, all crammed into a tiny box that we thought only controlled one measly light. Our volt meter read 6 volts with the circuit on (6?!). We were stumped.

Time to call in the professionals. Or actually, time to email the above picture to our dear friend, who is also a trained electrician. He's made an appearance in our blog before so let's finally name him, P. Being the kind person he is and realizing that we were working on a deadline, P and his wife L came over that very afternoon to help.

The proceedings were pretty much over my head (literally and figuratively) but it basically turned out that the wiring in our house is totally screwed up and some of the power was going down to the mystery switch in the hallway. Once P put the black wires and white wires in the right pairings, he noticed that when the switch was on, the breaker would get tripped. It seems that someone without a good understanding of electricity put a switch to the bedroom down at the bottom of the stairwell.

P worked some more magic, deactivated the mystery switch, and somehow got our light to work. Pretty glowing sun! And, more importantly, a room that could actually contribute to the value of our house, rather than look like a work in progress.

While D and P were playing with electricity, L and I was outside spreading compost on the lawn, finally using up a pile of a cubic yard that we had delivered months ago and gaining full use of our driveway again. Where would we be without good friends?! In the dark and stuck with a pile of compost in the driveway, that's where.

Sewing Dresser Steal

My furniture craze has reached its conclusion. Here's the last post for a while on my adventures in refinishing. I recently scored this cute little sewing dresser for $30 at a garage sale. I seem to have an inability to pass up cheap, good-quality wood furniture. I bought it without the slightest idea of where it will go when it's done, because it looked like it wouldn't take too much work to make it look beautiful again.

The piece is a rich mahogany (with an equally rich and very stubborn high-gloss stain). It had water rings, scratches, and weird discolored lines on it that looked like candle wax but was more permanent. But in all, these were only surface problems that could be sanded out. I was up for the challenge.

First I took all the hardware off to make it easier to sand. Unfortunately, somewhere between this step and finishing, I lost one of the little drawer knobs. It's probably sitting out in our yard somewhere, getting cracked and swollen from the heat and rain. Oops!

I started sanding with the orbital sander but noticed that it was starting to make circular patterns in the wood that I didn't like. It also couldn't get near the edges without wearing them down. So I switched to elbow grease, first in a rough 80 grit and then a finer 220. It became evident pretty quickly that I wasn't going to be able to remove the stain evenly (not with sand paper, anyway--I'd have to switch to chemicals for that and I wasn't willing to go that far). Instead, I sanded deep enough to remove the damages and create a nice antiqued, uneven look.

Unfortunately, the elbow grease brought another problem to light that I didn't notice when I bought the dresser. One leg must have fallen off and the previous owners had just used some glue to reattach it. It didn't last long with the aggressive sanding. So we smoothed the two edges, drilled a hole, and used a dowel* and wood glue to help create a stronger bond.

*Actually, funny story--we couldn't find an actual dowel stick and I didn't feel like running to Home Depot. We raided our stash of utensils and found some Chinese take-out wooden chopsticks that worked perfectly when cut into a 3'' segment.

The piece is a little wobbly now, so I might have to tweak the level by slipping something under the feet until it's steady. However, we don't think this is going somewhere that's going to see heavy traffic and use, so I'm not sure the wobble will really matter.

In that same vein, because this isn't going to be in heavy use, I decided I wanted to keep the more natural, sanded down look as much as possible and opted to use Minwax Paste Finishing Wax instead of the more water-resistant polycrylic. It gets rubbed on with a cloth and dries quickly. It's not actually just a wax and has a lot of VOCs and chemicals, so I made sure to wear a mask and opened the windows, since I did this step inside. You can see the difference a little bit from this picture--I put the wax on the right but not yet on the left. It basically makes it look a little damp and richer colored.

Here's the finished piece, minus one knob. Hopefully I can find some cute glass ones and replace all of them, since I doubt I'll ever find the missing one.

 I love the amount of storage space--3 drawers (including one that has metal rods to string up spools of thread) plus 2 deep bins. Not sure exactly where this guy is going, but I think he was well worth the price and time.

Happy Independence Day!

Hope you are having a great day. We'll probably fire up the grill and cook up some burgers and corn on the cob.

A few weeks ago we got to try out our s'mores maker, which I originally planned to use on our fireplace. Works much better on a grill when the coals are starting to cool down. They were tasty and charred without being burnt. Yum!

Stay cool and enjoy the holiday!

Foot rest, dinner table, drink table

We don't drink much coffee but we use our so-called "coffee table" for just about everything else. And we really missed having a table once we sold our old one and hadn't quite finished the new one. I told you last month about how bad my first attempt  at refinishing the table went--the sheen was uneven and splotchy and was rough in some spots and smooth in others (despite a lot of sanding).

I had no idea what to try next and after soliciting everyone for advice, decided to go with applying a regular oil-based primer with a brush to see if that would even out the texture of the spray paint. Time to tape the edges yet again (this makes 3 times). By that time, I was far too frustrated with the project to remember to take step-by-step pictures. After a coat of Sherwin Williams oil-based primer (which I bought 2 years ago for an as-yet-uncompleted project...), the texture was much more even.  We applied a second coat which I think was unnecessary, but between all of it, the table was looking much better..

To give credit where it's due, this idea can from the same friends who gave me the table--they'll figure into the blog more in an upcoming post too! Just like our parents, they are becoming regular, indispensable helpers here.

So two coats of oil-based primer and one night of drying later, I was ready to try again. Immediately it looked like the red was going to go on just as unevenly as the last two attempts. But then I tried something--I started spraying a thicker layer. Not so much that it dripped, but so that it accumulated into an actual coat of paint in one go, rather than the many thin passes I had been doing. It seemed to work. It took more spray paint than I predicted (and entailed a rather frantic run to Home Depot between coats for more), but the texture vanished.

Time for the fast forward: After three rather heavy coats, a couple days of drying, some lightly applied gray stain to match the legs (which, remember, looked fine from day one), some distressing and some polycrylic,  we got our table!!!

You can see how the light shines much more softly and evenly than in our previous attempts. My guess is that the paint-brush primer helped reset our previous failures better and the thicker spray helped even it out. It would seem all my problems can be attributed to my poor spray paint technique on such a large surface (I was fine on the legs and have previously spray painted hardware with no problem). I'm glad I decided to try spray paint, especially on such a used and abused surface like a coffee table. It will be more durable by far than regular latex paint.

But it might be a really long time before I try to do it again.