Riding high

“I could really use a lift.”

Overheard in most circumstances, this would mean, “Can I get a ride somewhere?”

At my house, however, “lift” means a lot more than a commitment of a few minutes and a couple of dollars of gas.

It means enough steel that a forklift is required to lift it, two men spending all day on an installation and the sacrifice of the third stall of the garage:

Why, yes, they do install four-post auto lifts in residential neighborhoods. And yes, this equipment is so very, very necessary when Dad is angling to spend more time with his 18-year-old son and Son is planning complicated repairs/modifications/improvements to his vehicles and ones yet to be invested in.

Fascinating, isn’t it, the soft underbelly of a Passat?

Such a contraption allows one to see secret things normally only mechanics witness. Like the underside of a car.

When he was shopping for said lift, my Beloved asked the salesperson if he could trust it to be safe when his pride and joy was under it.

“You mean an expensive sports car?” the salesman asked.

“No, I mean my only son.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, totally safe. We certify it.”

Me? While my men are spending time getting greasy in the garage, I get lots of free time to indulge in ridiculous endeavors like blogging and trolling for “Star Trek” related trailers and videos on You Tube (have you seen the Audi commercial starring Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto, aka Original Spock and Young Spock? Brilliant!).

 

Color scheme for a man cave

My Beloved saved some beat-up kitchen cabinets from certain death a couple years ago when he bought a whole kitchen’s worth for $75 off Craig’s List.

They were great for containing paint cans, miscellaneous screws, winter gear and various other garage doodads.

He resuscitated them again this weekend when he dug out his painting supplies and gave the cupboards a facelift:

Even the steps are painted orange and blue.

Think an ardent Chicago Bears fan lives here?

I said “shams” not “sham”

Remember the “Far Out Space Nuts”?

The Sid and Marty Krofft television show was one of Bob Denver’s 1975 attempts to capitalize on his “Gilligan Island’s” fame. He played Junior, a “seemingly dim-witted but uniquely clever maintenance worker employed by NASA,” who was accidentally sent into space. The premise relied on this memorable line yelled by Junior’s grumpy co-worker, Barney:

“I said ‘lunch’ not ‘launch’!”

How’s that for a lead to a story about a gift from my mother-in-law? She made me some new pillow shams to match the quilt I won a couple of years ago. I’m not faking you out — she really made them! This is not a shams sham.

The design of the quilt is is “Stars Over Llano,” a well-known Star of Texas design quilted by the fine ladies of Llano Grande resort. For the story about winning the quilt, click here.

The quilt is now on the bed in the guest room (we repainted that room last year — for the story of that makeover, click here), so these beautiful shams grace the pillows in there (where the bed is usually made).

Oh, my stars. I think it looks out of this world. Far out.

Aqua is the color of accomplishment

Paint is interior decor’s Spanx — it smooths out all kinds of surface blemishes.

My Beloved and I repainted the upstairs bathroom in recent weeks. Well, he did the painting and I did the grunt work that included removing the medicine cabinet from the wall (those 2-inch screws aren’t cooperative, I’ll tell ya). If you’re wondering why I haven’t posted anything of substance in the past two weeks, it’s because I had five author appearances in two states, attended the convention of the Association of Personal Photo Organizers and spent hours taping baseboards, scrubbing the showers and sinks, and toting painting supplies upstairs and down.

Some readers might recall our debate over the difference between baby blue and aqua, so I thought I’d share some before and after pictures.

Here’s the medicine cabinet before:

Who’s that little photographer in the reflection?

Do you think the paint can is fighting for attention with the bouquet?

Here’s the medicine cabinet after:

Here’s the shower area before:

Please note: The Oust air freshener is for guests. Our poop doesn’t stink.

Here’s the after shot:

We kept the shower curtain and invested in new towels. A girl on a budget doesn’t get both.

I have a great idea for new artwork above the towel rack to replace the nice Uppercase Living verse, but I’ll share that in a future post.

Though the shower curtain is not new, the shower curtain rod is. Yes, we bought into the craze for curved shower curtains, and now we have a straight one that needs a home. I’m thinking it would be a great baton for a karate enthusiast. Baton that looks like a shower curtain rod, anyone? Bueller?

 

 

50 shades of aqua

“That looks baby blue to me.”

“It’s not baby blue! It’s aqua.”

“It’s blue.”

“That’s blue,” I said, pointing to our guest bathroom on the main floor in Pittsburgh Paints’ Graceful. “This has green in it.”

“I think it’s baby blue,” my Beloved said as he surveyed the swathes of paint on the walls in the upstairs bath.

“It’s called Mint. Mint has green in it,” I insisted.

We’re tackling another paint job here at Minnesota Transplant’s house, and along with sanding dust, there’s dissent in the air.

We’re getting rid of the sage green accents and dingy white walls in the upstairs bathroom with the intent of adopting a pretty cocoa-and-aqua color scheme.

Only my version of aqua is more bluish than his is.

Apparently, aqua is not a black-and-white issue.

“Words are always approximate for mystery.”

~Krista Tippett, host of “On Being”

 

When I saw ‘how to make a car louder’ on the search history of my iPad, I should have known this was coming

Hanging around with an 18-year-old young man introduces me to a lot of concepts out of my comfort zone.

Like exhaust tips.

Yeah, I didn’t know what exhaust tips were either.

If you’re a motorhead, you’re rolling your eyes right now, but I’m not a motorhead. My stepson is though.

He’s the one who is earning money this summer changing people’s oil at Valvoline Instant Oil Change. And every spare cent from his paychecks is going into his car.

He took a few days off to visit us this weekend, and he made full advantage of his dad’s know-how and tools to improve his exhaust system.

Well, “improve” in his view.

It’s a lot louder, that’s for sure. “It’s insane,” he says, as I recorded a video on his phone for him to send to one of his Valvoline friends.

I’m interested in how my car sounds, too, but I’m usually looking for quieter, not louder, and when it starts popping when I rev it, it’s time to call the mechanic.

Not that I ever rev my engine.

In any case, the tinkering required new exhaust tips. Here’s Cas modeling them:

Caswell’s double EEs (two exhaust tips, silly!).

OK, exhaust tips are not a mansiere. This heretofore-unknown-to me-automobile accessory is the showy end of an auto’s exhaust system. On his car, they come in pairs.

They even look good in the rain.

They’re insane all right.

DIY gift wrap organization

For those of you with organized gift wrap who can put their hands on the turquoise tissue paper that complements the gift bag that is the perfect size for your sister’s birthday gift, you are excused.

Or, you may stick around and gloat about how your gift wrap organization is better than mine.

Your choice.

Gift wrap: Organized

For those of you with a wreck of wrap, I finally organized my mess into a system that works for me, and I’m so pleased, I’m sharing a few tips.

The before: My gift wrap was a pile of paper, assorted used gift bags numbering in the dozens (who throws out gift bags?), ribbons and bows, and a few empty boxes, sturdy and pretty enough I couldn’t bring myself to crush them.

When I needed to wrap a gift, I sorted through the mammoth pile in my office closet, chose something marginally appropriate and shoved the whole mess behind closed doors. Or I went out and bought the perfect gift wrap for something along the lines of 50% of the cost of the gift itself.

Ugh.

Tip 1: Sort  A few weeks ago, I moved the whole jumble to the living room floor, where I spent the better part of an hour throwing out torn paper and bags, sorting bags into categories (Christmas, generic, fabric, printed shopping bags), gently folding tissue paper and corralling a half-dozen rolls of ribbon.

Tip 2: Contain  Each type of bag was stored in the largest bag of its kind. I kept the shopping bags because they’re good enough quality to transport lunches, potluck odds-and-ends and other items I’m handing off to friends, and since I didn’t pay for the bags (at least directly), I don’t feel bad throwing them away at my destination.

I also stored the tissue paper and bows/ribbons in gift bags, meaning I had six gift bags of bags to deal with. Lining them up on the floor of my closet was only marginally better than having a huge pile of wrapping there.

I looked for a suitable device to store all my gift wrap, but nothing fit my collection (too few rolls of wrap, too few bows, too many bags), and they were all wildly expensive. (I’m so cheap I don’t throw away used gift bags — I simply couldn’t bear to spend $60 plus shipping to store my used gift bags).

That’s where 3M’s Command brand hooks came into play.

Tip 3: Use vertical space  For $8.98, I got four hooks that hold up to 3 pounds of stuff — and I used only three hooks. (Ooh, where should I use the fourth hook?)

So now that mess that formerly took up six square feet of floor space in my office closet is now filling only two square feet (it is probably occupying the same cubic feet, but I can’t do the math on that). In any case, I can actually close the door without worrying about landslides.

Look! You can see the carpet on the closet floor!

All the gift boxes went on the shelf above the wrap (it’s the prerogative of a tall woman to stack stuff on closet shelves).

Ta da! I can find the bag I need and coordinating tissue paper in a flash.

Now, if I could just organize my receipts so neatly.

Sigh.

Sweetheart’s DIY project involves resection and transplant

Our garage looked like a bit like a surgical suite.

My Beloved had a 1994 Jeep Wrangler in there (the most recent of more than a dozen vehicle acquisitions recounted in yesterday’s post), and it got a new heart, er, engine.

Trolling for a fix-up project, he found the Jeep on Craig’s List listed as having a blown engine. The body had potential, so he struck a deal with the owner, pushed it onto his trailer and hauled it home. I got the opportunity to help him push it off the trailer and into the garage (thanks, neighbor, for adding firepower to this distressed damsel’s muscle).

Meanwhile, he located on Craig’s List an operational Jeep motor in, of all places, Manvel, N.D.

For those of you unfamiliar with U.S. geography, that’s 700 miles northwest of here.

One does not typically pack up a motor in a box and mail it away.

Fortunately, our journey of retrieval coincided with a visit home to Minnesota, and I worked in a lovely visit with my cousin and aunt in Fargo, so we didn’t waste a lot of miles fetching this fine motor purported to have only 34,000 miles on it.

A cherry picker, picking cherry motors.

For those of you who haven’t had the experience of replacing a vehicle’s engine (most of us sell the car before replacing the motor), such a project requires a tool called a cherry picker. The name is derived from an instrument used to pick cherries (and other produce) from tall, unclimbable trees, but in this particular case, it’s an implement that hoists an engine in or out of a vehicle.

Tyler didn’t own a cherry picker, but he found a used one on — yup, you guessed it — Craig’s List.

With the ailing patient, the functioning transplant and the surgical equipment to get the job done all in one place, my Beloved spent the weekend installing the new(er) motor.

For those of you who are daily readers, you’ll recall I was cutting fabric off an old shirt and ducking the hassle of sewing a new hem while my Beloved. Was replacing. An. Engine.

He’s amazing.

Mid-surgery, this is a shot inside the hood of the 1994 Jeep Wrangler without ANY motor.

For a few brief and greasy moments, I served as surgical nurse fulfilling the “here, hold this” role while he screwed a new oil pan onto the motor. Like watching video of the inside of a person’s intestine, it was both amazing and disgusting being among the few non-mechanically inclined people on earth to see the inside of an oil pan.

And here’s the kicker (or, perhaps to extend the metaphor, ticker): It works.

By 6 p.m. last night, I heard the purr of an engine emanating from our garage. I’m sure Tyler would extend a big thanks to our mechanically gifted young friend who assisted.

By 7:30, the patient was already up and walking around. We took it out for a spin to get supper.

Once again, we must find room for three vehicles in our driveway.

And my Beloved is already talking about his next project.

Fashion fix via scissors

Raw edges don’t scare me! Take that, Strangely Proportioned Shirt — chop, chop, chop!

Inspired by Zhenya over at “Being Zhenya: Style, Fashion, DIY, Thrifting,” I got wild with a household instrument today. Zhenya never hesitates to take a scissors to a piece of clothing that needs an update, remodel or complete overhaul.

Not too long ago, Zhenya solved the problem of T-shirt armpit stains by cutting out the stains! I clicked on her post looking for a magic laundry formula, and instead I found her wielding her scissors like a woman on a Mission: Impossible.

How novel, I thought. I never would have thought of that. (That’s one of the reasons I subscribe to something on the lines of two dozen blogs now — I am exposed to a plethora of novel ideas every week.)

As I got dressed this morning, I searched through my closet looking for something different and came upon this bright number. I wear it rarely because is too short to be worn alone (at least by a woman my age), too long to wear with shorts, too sheer to wear without something underneath, and it has weird, useless pockets that show through.

Though I’ve owned it six or seven years, I’ve worn it twice (no, I don’t know why I’ve kept it so long either — but it’s such a happy shade of yellow and it has such a nice neckline). I put it on, apparently hoping it had changed since the last time I donned it, and discovered …

It was still too short, too long, too sheer and had weird pockets.

Empowered by Zhenya (and the prospect of a blog post), I whipped out a pair of scissors and cut off the bottom and the pockets, thinking the worst thing I would have would be a shirt with raw edges that falls apart in the washer, which would finally be the excuse I could use to throw it away.

I’m pleased to have found today’s fashion statement. I’m wearing it now, the raw edges conveniently tucked away (what happens later, be darned), and I’m reminded of how the happy color brightens my day (instead of my closet).

Here’s to making bold moves today!

 

And the curtains parted and the heavens rejoiced

Who needs a stick when a remote control will do?

Like Moses dividing the Red Sea, my handy Beloved now can open the curtains with a stretch of his hand.

No blasphemy intended.

A couple of weeks ago, my Beloved installed remote control curtains in the master bedroom. Click here to read about the confusing instructions that came along with that eBay find.

In any case, he’s a smart guy and he figured out how to make the curtain track work. And he hung the curtains. And I ironed the curtains and he hung them again. Though darker than the former curtains, the new curtains still weren’t dark enough for his light-sensitive blue eyes, so he found some curtain liners on eBay, too.

Now, though, we had curtains and liners hanging on the same track. Would they still work?

Wanna see?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VvflLQ7feSE

Indeed they do. (Ain’t YouTube grand?)