These are a few of my favorite things

 

 

 

Who can tell me what this is?  Don't worry, I won't be mad at you if you get it wrong.  Super hubby got it wrong too.  I think he thought it was a Popsicle. 

It's a sailboat on the water in the sunset.  See it now?  Cool, huh?  Grandpa George made this and I was lucky enough to get to keep it.  So it's safely tucked into my china hutch right here:

Perfectly hiding my bottle of Patron.  Shhhh.

 

Grandpa also made these:

These were the windows in the front door of the house.  You''ll have to excuse my next few photos because I couldn't find any photos that I had deliberately taken of the door.  But they'll suffice.

 

 

Obviously, when I took this one, I thought I had the most awesome fake Christmas tree ever.  Dig the carpet it sits on.  Nice.  No presents under the tree either... I'm pretty sure that's because the date of this photo is pre-children and all of our extra money was spent on beer.  I digress.  See the door to the right?  That's the point of this photo.

 

The wood in the door was quite discolored and starting to split and rot so when we did some painting later on, we also painted the door aka polished a turd. 

Now let's take a moment to appreciate the real beauty of this photo... Jace, Daddy and his eternal piece of gum in his mouth. This was taken in 2007 with a camera that used real film and didn't have a screen on it so I have to give an A for the selfie... Pretty impressive.

 

We had to bid farewell to the door but Husband was able to preserve the glass so now they patiently sit waiting to be re-purposed.  I haven't figured out yet what I am going to do with them but when I do, it'll be super neato.  Ideas are welcome.  Maybe I should ask Pinterest... She would probably have some good ideas.  Whatever I do, I promise you'll be the last to know :)

 

 

 

These are some little window corners Grandpa also made... So cute and elegant. 

It's the little things in life.....

 

 

 

In wanting to keep with some of the history of the house, our new front door is also glass.   

Not as interesting as the previous one but still nice.  I've been wondering if I colored the different window panels with magic markers if it would have the same colored effect? The kids could help me with that project.  Husband works long hours in the spring and will be gone a lot so maybe we'll find out then......
Yes, I AM kidding.  What kind of nut job would ever color on their house with magic markers? 
Oh.  Nevermind.

 

 

A penny saved is a penny ...

....used to tile!

The hint was:  Abe Lincoln

I had coffee with my friend Pinterest the other morning and she told me about this FABULOUS idea of using pennies as floor tiling and counter top tiling.  I was smitten.  So I walked around my house (on the inside) trying to find an area in which I could do this fabulous idea...

And I found one!

Ugh.  I am lying.  Dammit.  Super Husband found it.

The fireplace threshold in The Basement!!!  Small (so it won't cost a million dollars) , flat and not right in your face so that if this project ends up sucking (and it ALMOST did), it won't be THAT noticeable.  BUT, if it turns out cool (cool probably isn't the best choice of an adjective here since it's the area right in front of the fireplace...) So if it turns out smokin'  - our guests can easily be directed to the area to admire our awesomeness.

The area.  About 8 square feet.

The helper

It should be illegal having helpers this cute.

Pennies with love

Obviously when you tile pennies, they are not going to completely cover the area so we painted a board with black oil-based paint (gloss finish) to lay the pennies out on.  Hi Patsy.

First we attached the board to the threshold

Then, we laid out the pennies.  The first row is the trickiest but after that, they kind of just slide into place.

Once the pennies were all placed, the next step was going to be to do a pour-on epoxy over them...

BUT, super hubby did a little more reading and decided that we should have glued the pennies to the board.  It would probably be kind of snotty for me to say something like, "I told you so" right about now so I won't.

We picked up aaaaaall of the pennies and started over again so we could glue them down.

One. By. One.

I am going to get in soooo much trouble for giving you the details I'm about to reveal but I'll take one for the team. I feel it's important to tell you all of this and about our 216 mistakes so that if you decide to take on a project like this one yourself, you won't make the same mistakes that we made.  Or throw up every time you look at a penny like I do now.

Use glue that says right on the bottle that it DRIES CLEAR. 

Regular Elmer's Glue that you buy for the kiddos works just fine.

NOT, this glue:

Or this will happen.  It looks like snot oozed through the pennies.  Gross.

So now what?!?!?!?

We start over.  Sort of.

Super (pissed off) hubby sanded the glue down and made the surface all smooth again and then we just painted right over the glue and pennies with the black oil-based paint.

 Once it was almost dry - still a bit tacky - we just started putting the pennies down again.  It was our own sick little penny blackjack table and we kept losing.

The moment has arrived.  We are gonna seal this baby and be done!

So we thought :(

If you ever use a pour-on finish, one of the steps is that once it's poured, you have to pretty much babysit it for tiny air bubbles that begin to appear. 

Like this:

After a few minutes, they started to show up so we did as the directions stated and used a small torch to get rid them. 

They were kinda hard to see so we plugged in our construction light to shine on the pennies so we could see the little bastards when they would make an entrance.  BIG MISTAKE.

The light "baked" an area of the finish and ruined it.

SON OF A CHICKEN IN A BISCUIT!!!!!

(That's not what we really said but I'm trying to keep this blog rated PG)

So..........what in the heck do we do now?  More reading.  More researching.  And I called Pinterest and bawled my head off .  Then pouted.

What we found out:  Pour-on finishes can be sanded, buffed and reapplied.  Thank God.  No more losing at the penny blackjack table. 

Sanding was not an easy task. The air bubbles trapped the dust so an air compressor was used to clean them out.  It was tedious work.  Hateful, actually.  All because of a hot headed light and 2 crazy people on a bubble witch hunt.


Lessons to be learned from this:

1. Glue the pennies down the FIRST time
2. Use a glue that dries clear
3. Don't shine a super-hot lamp on your freshly poured epoxy
4. Don't eat a a Fiber One bar if you have to be someplace quiet in the next 6 hours.

Ultimately, we prevailed.  We always do :)

Ryan & Milissa -1           Pennies - 0


Tah-dah!

Once the penny project was complete, we were able to put up the brick.

Wasn't too tough, just super dusty.

The brick came in 6" x 24" pieces.  Heavy pieces.
I am proud to say we can now add masonry work to our resumes.

We glued 'em up with a heavy duty adhesive:

April (in 16 days) Fools!  Got ya, didn't I?!?!

We used this:

Ryan started in the middle to get a straight line going and then worked from there.  He used the 2x6's you see here as a brace once he glued the first row. 

 

 

We also mounted the TV bracket at this time too and then bricked around it.

 

 

Done! 

Getting closer to a finished basement.... I think....

 

Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

Sneak peek

  Psssst!

The hint was:  Abe Lincoln

Hmmmmmmm........ 

All of our leftover pennies after role-playing the scene from Ghost came in handy for this project.

 

 

Here's another hint:  This is NOT sheet rock.

 Stay tuned!

Fun Fact #2

Fun Fact #2  / History Lesson

This house has so much history.  So much so, that it's impossible to tell you all of it.  Now that I have this electronic scrapbook, I am certainly going to try to recall as much of it as I can.  I realize that unless you're me or someone in my family or connected to my family, it's not going to be THAT profound for you to read but hopefully you can still appreciate the little tidbits.  And I can appreciate the fact that you're reading my little stories and that I have now "wrote them down" somewhere to pass them along. 

No, I'm not dying or anything.


Meet Grandpa George.  He built The House.  This is Grandpa in his element.  Sitting in that chair on that side of the table with the paper, a smoke and undoubtedly listening to Paul Harvey coming from the radio that always sat next to the stove.  He loved to drink beer, make beautiful stained-glass and garden.  Hence, the Greenhouse.

 

Meet Grandma Margie.  Grandpa may have built this house, but she ran it :) 

She drank coffee like it was going out of style, played a mean game of Whist, also loved to garden and could swear with the best of them. My idol.

(Please note the wallpaper aka hateful paper from hell in the background as well as

the delicious can of Tab on the table.)

I mentioned in one of my first posts that they were close family friends that I grew up knowing as my grandparents.  How that came about was that they were my Dad's next-door neighbors when he was growing up and were like a second set of parents to him and grandparents to me.  I can not tell you how absolutely blessed I was to have them in my life.  Part of the reason I started this blog was as a tribute to them.

This is me with them on my wedding day in 2001

My fun little fact to tell you - it's actually not so little - is that this ENTIRE house was built by Grandpa and his men without using any power tools.  To me, that is almost incomprehensible!!! (Is that even a word?  Who cares - you know what I mean.)  I can't even take a screw out of a toy to put new batteries in it without using an electric screwdriver much less build an entire house?!?! 
In the famous words of Grandma Margie, "Well hooo-leee shit."