Saturday at home

Oh my, finally a Saturday at home with NO plans.  No rushing around with commitments or planned activities.  We woke up figuring that we can do some things around here the need getting done.

As we sipped coffee on the front porch, we decided to hit a few rummage sales.  I need a hunk of "mustard" colored fabric for a customer's order of a rag rug.  Also we are looking for a cabinet for the downstairs bathroom to hold toilet paper and supplies, not too big, not too small.  Perhaps even a shelf?  Plus I am keeping an eye out for cheap Halloween decorations because we will be decorating up our campsite at the park for the big festival.  I did stop at a rummage sale on Friday and got a whole bagful of orange and black lights, some little ghost and bones lights and some other fun decorations.  So I am ahead of the game on there.  Look back at my blog post from last year and you will see why I need all the stuff----

Halloween at High Cliff State Park 2012

Well, we hit the rummage sales and some thrift shops and scurried home with our treasures....

I found these four signed watercolor prints from an artist in California named B. Papais.   I looked up her stuff and prints like this sell from $40-60 each plus professional framing and matting in the $100 range!  And I got them for $10 each!  Such a bargain and I scooped them up.   The frames were lighter wood, almost a pecan color, so I gave each one a layer of colored polyurethane to match the woodwork in our house.  I think I am going to put them in a descending line to look at as we come down the foyer staircase each day.

Added this photo this afternoon to the blog post... here is a pic of the four prints spaced out on the wall from upstairs going down to the front foyer.  I got Steveio to help me put them up after the PACKER GAME WIN!  whee heeeeee    We hung the first one and the last one, and measured the space in between with a tape measure.  Divided that into three sections so we knew where to put up the middle two nails.  Worked out perfectly!   Steveio should have been an interior decorator????

Speaking of staining, last week I stained up some sections of red oak trim to put in the lower bathroom.  It's a tiny room that once was a closet, so the trim around the room was originally boards with old fashioned hooks in them.  Steve moved those wooden sections down to the back hallway for coats and we painted the upper portions of the bathroom walls.  I like the funky 60's yellow wallpaper  on the lower portions of the walls in there, so we are keeping that.  Steve got out the level and air nailer with the compressor and got to work on the trim.

A funny thing was discovered when I was painting the bathroom a few weeks ago.  We had removed the suspended ceiling panels to give them a fresh coat of paint, and on the walls above the grid for the panels I saw some TIC TAC TOE games drawn on the walls with pencil!  And a math problem too.

I took these pics and sent them to a daughter who grew up in this house. She has noooo idea of why the pencil graffiti was there. So probably whomever was hanging the panels had to wait for someone to bring a tool or whatever.  Standing there on a ladder with not much to do, and a pencil in his or her hand, they played TIC TAC TOE with someone!!!  LOL

Another thing I really liked in the bathroom was this glass shade and wall light fixture.  I repainted the fixture with a speckle spray paint and the shade is just wonderful with little dots of clear sections like glass beads and some milky glass.  I am sure it's old.   And here is the cabinet we found for $7.50 at a rummage sale!  It's perfect for what I wanted!!!  Steve had to drill some mounting holes in the back wooden panel before hanging it on the wall.

 Now---- our lower bathroom is DONE! 

 (When we bought the house, this funky little yellow kitty cat 

holds the toilet cleaning brush will remain in the bathroom) 

I had bought a bag full of beets from the Farmer's Market on Friday, and they needed to be cleaned up, simmered and slurped off the skins to make up a batch of pickled beets!   My laundry room sink is a perfect place to do the messy canning jobs, instead of the nice copper one in the main kitchen.  While Steve took a nap, I worked on the beets....  before I knew it, PING PING PING the sound of sealing lids was echoing through the house.  8 quarts and 5 pints later, I was done with that task. 

I got some weaving done too... the weather was lovely and I had all the windows open for fresh air.  But we did have frost warnings so the heat had been on overnight.  I am working on some denim rugs for a customer on the Newcomb loom that I bought last winter and stowed away. This is my first time using it, but it's just like two others I sold last spring when we were moving. It was like an old familiar friend to weave on a Newcomb Studio Loom again!

The loom works great, but I am missing the front cloth takeup lever!  I called the gal I bought the loom from and she is looking for it.  In the meantime, I had it all warped up and threaded and ready to go, but no way to exert tension on the front beam to latch it tight for the weaving process.  Being a Hardware Store Kinda Gal, I ran down to Farm and Home store here in Chilton and bought a "strap wrench".  Solved my problem!  Now I can crank the front beam tight enough to weave.  It will work until Carol finds the missing one, or Steve makes me a new one.

(I need to removed the numbered masking tape sections yet) 

Speaking of my Loom Room and staining, I used the colored polyurethane (called Polyshades by MinWax) to give a coat to these oak french doors we bought off Craigslist.  The guy said that they came out of a church, and he was going to fit them to his house but they would need to be cut down. He never got around to it.  Instead he sold them to us for a very reasonable price.  They are quite heavy and each pane of glass is individual, not just a grid over a single piece of glass.  We needed to put in a spacer to bring them down just close to the carpeting and they fit great!

BEFORE                                                           AFTER

We nailed up some more of my oak trim over the top area where the spacer is showing.  I have two old looking drawer pulls to attach as knobs once we decide which way we want them opening, from the left or the right.

Two sides in the restaining process didn't come out too good, so we are going to take them back off this week to restain them and hang them back on the track again.  It's a track like a bedroom closet to slide by each other.  The purpose of this set of doors is not only to keep the grandtots out of my loom room when I am not looking (think: needles, pins, scissors and cutting wheels)   but also to keep the room closed when not in use for heating and cooling purposes.  If the doors are closed, the thermostat right around the corner will only activate for the dining and livingroom temps where we are sitting at night.  I won't heat the Loom Room unless I am in there working.

One more staining project we took care of this week was the tiny section of plate rail to the left of this mirror.   Originally there had been a taller hutch built in here on the wall, but we moved that to my Loom Room and set in the buffet to my dining room set and hung this mirror.  The walls have a plate rail running all the way around the dining room, but this small section needed to have a new "end" created for it where it had butted up to the hutch, and another "end" for the other side.  Steve traced the pattern and cut out some new "ends" with the scroll saw.  I stained them up and they were dry enough to tack into place while he had the air nail gun and air hose snaking into the house.

Of course once he made the ends, when we went to install them, the whole mirror had to be moved over 2 inches to balance the wall space!  arggghhh It's very heavy and mounted with big screws right into the studs.  Luckily we were able to still get into the stud on one side and put a wall fastener on the other side.

Instead of plates, I filled the rails all around the room with family photos. 

Mom and Dad P are on the left side in the oval frame. 

It's a pouring wet rainy Sunday morning here.  Good to stay in, wear soft sweats and warm socks as the temps might not even get to 60.  It's a Packer Game day, so we will watch the game on tv from the warmth of our livingroom.   I might get some weaving done, or maybe list a bunch of my unsold inventory from the craft sale into my Etsy store.

My mom has converted over from her WebTV console to a laptop, so I am going to call her and walk through some of the process to reset a port for her modem.  For some reason it goofed up and I have to figure out long distance to Florida on how to get it back! arggghhhhhh