Sunday

Here I am doing a line of caulk.

Cool sign

Window dressings

There's this thing they do in South Philly: decorate their windows and doors for the holidays. When we moved in, it was Christmas lights and Santa cutouts.  On approximately January 2nd, every window on the block had candy hearts and roses.  Now that Valentine's Day is over, however, things have gotten a little hairy.  Here are three pictures of three houses right next to each other and directly across the street from us, demonstrating the competing holidays.  (Apologies that the pictures are fuzzy; I took them from inside our own house so people wouldn't think I was nuts.)

Saint Patrick's Day

Chinese New Year

Easter

I'm trying to decide whether I should just put some nice seasonal flowers in our window box and leave it at that, or if I should fully embrace the tackiness and make it my goal to outdo everyone on the street.

Pulling staples

It's hard for me to type this right now because my hands are so swollen from pulling staples out of the stairs.  I've pulled staples a lot before in different areas, but something about the pliers I was using today, or perhaps the fact that I did it for several hours, resulted in severely swollen hands.  Whoever installed the carpet saw fit to shoot hundreds of little tiny staples into each step.  We pulled the carpet up but left the pad on top of each step, so we were only pulling from the back of the steps, if that makes sense.  Greg, Barb and I worked for a couple hours each and only got the staples out of 4 or 5 steps.

Three cheers for storage

The various storage spaces around the house have officially gone from being empty gaping areas to real closets, with shelves and rods and everything.  Above is the bedroom closet, which is actually huge.  Barb and I both declared, separately, that one could store several small children in here.

This is a glimpse of the storage area at the top of the basement stairs.  We'll probably use it as a pantry area.

And this is the coat closet in the living room.  This picture is also notable because it shows the trim work and that the closet has a door.  Yes, the doors are up and the trim is done, which means that we're a few days of clean-up and sanding away from paint!

Dust

These pictures do not in any way convey how very dusty our house was after the walls were sanded.  The picture above shows a pair of gloves sitting on the banister, which is actually black, but looks white.  

Here are the stairs.  The dust in the center has been worn away by people going up and down, but hopefully it gives an idea of how dusty they are.

And here is a very frightening picture of some crazy-looking person who has been wiping the dust off the walls all day long.  This house is turning me prematurely gray, it seems.

Trim

With the drywall installed, taped, spackled and sanded, it's time for the trim to go up.  Roger, our contractor (and Greg's cousin) emailed us a list of what he wanted us to get for the trim. 

This is how the list read:

base 3 1/2" colonial feather edge 164'

1/4" shoe molding 31"

outside corner trim 1 1/8" wide 40'

mullion 2 - 8'  1 5/16" wide

door stop 1 1/4" wide 12'

pack of cedar shims

PL glue -- 1 big tube

To some, that list of items might make perfect sense.  For Greg and me, however, it required serious research and translation.  Mullion?  Eventually, we decided to just head over to Home Depot and hope we could figure it out.   We wandered up and down the trim aisle, checking available widths with what were required.  3 of the 5 sizes didn't seem to exist, so we tried to find the next closest.  A helpful employee showed me the difference between colonial edge and clamshell, which was a moment of major revelation.  We stupidly forgot to bring a writing utensil, so I was checking things off the list with a tube of lipstick I found in my purse.

When we finally (thought) we had what we needed, we checked out and faced the daunting obstacle of loading up the truck and transferring 16 foot lengths of trim back to the house.

Greg hung a Target grocery bag off the edge of the trim as a substitute for a caution flag.

It ended up going through the window in the back of the cab all the way to the windshield.

We secured it with bungees, but just to be sure, I hung on for dear life.  We made it back without incident, but unfortunately had misread the list and grabbed 4 feet of one item instead of 40.  Back to Home Depot!