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May the Floors Be With You
Wow. That title is awful and doesn’t even make any sense. (Sorry, George Lucas.) This post is about my subfloor. Sounds boring right? But I hope you’ll stick with me and read it to the end because I deserve serious props for what I’ve accomplished here all by myself and I need you to tell me how impressed you are. Even if you really don’t mean it. Fake compliments are OK. I won’t know the difference. And now here’s a cute picture of Egor (you can see the floor in the background, so it’s relevant) to keep you interested enough to keep reading…
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The Major Award in My Bay Window
It’s Fra-gee-lay
I’m so excited! A Major Award!!! I’m going to display it proudly in my new bay window for all the world to see. What did I do to get this Major Award?
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DIY Electrical Wiring
Sometimes I Like to Pretend I’m an Electrician
You know the feeling when you shuffle your feet on the carpet and then (accidentally!) touch the cat? (Sorry, Egor…) Touching a live wire is not like that. It’s more of a pulse than a shock. If you were thinking you might like to try it, my advice would be… do not. (I may have just saved your life. You’re welcome.)
So, why was I playing with electricity? Well, my crappy house had crappy wiring, of course. Aluminum…
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A Fig Tree in New York
What The Fig?
I have a big ass fig tree in my yard. I don’t know much about fig trees (I don’t even like figs), but people who do know about fig trees have seen mine and have told me it’s the biggest figging one they’ve seen in New York. They want to know my secret. How did my tree get so big and healthy in this climate? How does it produce so many figs? Here’s what I do…
Nothing!
I’ve heard that little old Italian men grow fig trees in the northeast and they’re small and fragile (the trees are – and maybe the little old men too) and they lovingly wrap them to protect them from the wind and cold of winter and then hope that they survive and then actually bear fruit in the spring.
My tree gets no blanket. No warm milk. No bedtime story. My tree is on its own. My tree is a bad ass. It scoffs at winter. It looks the cold square in the eye and gives it the middle branch. It thrives amidst adversity. In the winter, it looks like this:
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I Turned a Spare Bedroom into a Dressing Room
It’s More Than a Closet. It’s a Sanctuary.
What do you do when you’re somehow amazingly able to find an affordable house with three bedrooms and you really only need two? Well, duh! You turn that superfluous bedroom into a dream closet, of course! A dressing room. How many people actually get to have their own dressing room? Celebrities. Rich people. And me!
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Removing Load Bearing Walls
Wallectomy: The Surgical Removal of Load Bearing Walls
I moved into my crappy house in July of 2011. By January of 2012 I had made little progress on the east wing due to the fact that removing load bearing walls is neither easy nor free. Who knew? (Only just everyone.) Performing a wallectomy isn’t like removing any old wall. You do it wrong and your house basically falls down. It dies. No one wants a dead house, so I had to leave it to the professionals. Luckily, my cousin (Tommy) is one of those, and he likes me, so he eventually made some time to help me out. On the last day of January, I got the call. His exact words? “I’m coming tomorrow. Get the f*ck out.” So Egor and I did.
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Literally Hundreds of Scary Wasps Hiding in My Wall!
OK, maybe I exaggerated a little bit to get your attention. First of all, this picture is not a wasp, it’s a scary hornet. And second of all, the wasps were in the walls. At some point. A while ago. Then they packed up their crap and moved out. This house was too crappy, even for them.
And maybe it wasn’t hundreds. Probably not.
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My Chandelier Makeover
I love chandeliers. They’re ridiculously trendy now, but about 5 years ago, when I needed a black one for my bedroom, the only reasonably priced ones I could find were from stores in the UK. (That happens to me all the time. Damn you, England, and your cute shops with awesome stuff that won’t ship to me.) The cheapest one I could find in the US was like $300. It wasn’t in the budget. So I started trying to come up with alternatives. I found a plain, old, brass chandelier frame on E-Bay with the wiring intact for like $20. I bought it.
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My Crappy Basement
Don’t go down the stairs! Just trust me…
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I ♥ My Bathroom
Ironically, my bathroom was the first room in my house to stop being crappy. (Get it? Bathroom…? Crappy…? Oh, never mind.) It was fully renovated before I moved in and it didn’t cost me anything. I know! What??
