Quilting and Other Hobbies

After a great deal of swearing, I was able to finish Lauri's quilt.  The machine was having some issues with tension and speed control.  The stitch regulator is having some issues again.  It broke the thread about a dozen times around the middle of the quilt.  Ugh!  I rethreaded it a couple of times and it started behaving in the last third of the job.  I'm going to work with it a bit longer and see if it continues to have problems before I take it in for repair.

Here's a close up of the quilt that I took in a puddle of sunshine coming in the windows.  It's so sparkley!!

Once I got the last customer's quilt off the racks, I decided I wanted to get one of my quilts done up right away.  I dug around in the bins and came up with this floral fabric to add to the back.  It was absolutely perfect!  I couldn't have found a better quilt back if I had started with it and matched fabrics to it.  Not sure what I'll do with it when I'm done.  I have far too many quilts lying around that aren't getting used, though.  This is a twin size, by the way.  Maybe Emma will want a new one, although I still have to finish her Japanese quilt--it just needs a binding.

I had to piece the back to make it large enough.  One thing that people don't always realize is that you need to sew a generous 1/2" seam and trim the selvages.  The edges of the fabrics are often woven differently and will shrink differently when washed and dried, so trimming that 1/4" off the edge is important.  You don't want your work to end up puckered.

I've been having a long debate about whether or not to continue this quilting & crafting business.  I'm not making any significant income from it and I'm tired.  I could still quilt things for friends, but do it in trade or something.  According to what I could find, if I earn more than $400 in a year, I have to declare it.  But what about someone who does occasional babysitting?  A couple of days a month, you earn $20 per night from a friend who goes out on a date with her husband, and you have to declare that as income?

We have a problem with one of the newer windows that we had installed in Emma's room.  I don't know if it was installed incorrectly or if something broke off, but it's got a massive breeze coming through when the window is closed.  You can see daylight.  It's bad.  I put in a call to the handyman a couple days ago but I haven't heard back from him yet.  Maybe I need to try calling again since I left a message...relying on technology...which can be rather unreliable.  We've got a cold snap moving into the area and may possibly be snowing this weekend, so getting her room weather-tight is important.

I have one more side of Grandma's flower garden quilt to finish up.  No, she's not my Grandma--my grandmothers both died in 1987 and 89--I'm talking about our church's Father's mother.  It's very close to being done, so I need to work a bit more tomorrow and maybe give the owner a call tomorrow afternoon so she can pick it up and enjoy it!

The last couple of days, I have to make a bunch of beads for the Lampworker's Guild as well as a dozen or so I'm making for a commission.  Since I posted pictures, I've gotten a few more people asking to buy beads.  Maybe I need to switch from quilting to bead making?  I also need to make a handout and samples for a class I'm teaching on Saturday.  The class is called "Sewing Limp Parchment Books" using paper and string.  Woo.

Quilting and Science Experiments

This is as far as I've gotten on the Half-Square Frenzy.  I will be adding a narrow border of something, probably in lime green (Rave Green, for all those Sounders fans out there) and then a wider border in purple or dark blue.  I don't have enough of any of the purples left to make a border, so...shucky-darn...I'll have to do a little shopping.  That's OK, I need to get some Halloween fabrics for the swap next week anyway.

And this is what Emma's One-Block Wonder looks like.  I used the Japanese fabric around the outside that made up the hexagons in the middle, so you can get a view of what the fabric used to look like.  Looking at it now, I should have put in a narrow border between the hexagons and the print, but c'est la vie.

Speaking of la Francais, Emma is enrolled in French this year.  It'll be fun to re-learn along with her and she can practice a little with my parents (who learned a lot more than I ever did...then again, I never traveled to France to be able to use it outside of the classroom).

Mr. B, on the other hand, was invited to be part of a study at Children's to test the Safety and effects of Lumacaftor and Ivacaftor, the drugs developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals that will, hopefully, be a life-changing concoction for patients with CF.  He is not sure he wants to be part of the study; we're talking to him about it and he'll have to make up his mind soon.

I started going to yoga.  It isn't very intense and the instructor gives options for modifications for poses that *some of us* can't do, and gives the over-achievers poses to challenge them.  I like that this instructor isn't a 90 lb. rubber band; she's actually on the plus-side.  She also doesn't laugh when I lose my balance and fall over, which I really appreciate.  I will have to remember not to set up my mat next to the mirror.  I don't need to see that.

I took my longarm machine in for a tune-up before we went on our long trip, and I finally got it back today.  Apparently it's been sitting there waiting for me for several days, but they forgot to call and tell me to come get it.  That was nice of them.  I was having trouble with the stitch regulator going too fast, so they had to fix that as well as give it the usual lube-oil-filter treatment.  They did a bunch of repairs on it including replacing the main board and the power board (some kind of computerized electronics on it), removed thread jams from the roller wheels, installed missing washers from the encoder kits (wonder why those weren't there to begin with?), removed burrs and delinted everything.  The cost to do all that would have been $1200.  That's right--TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS!  Luckily, I had purchased the extended warranty and service package (about $300) and it covers it ALL.  Totally worth it.  Heck, it covered the broken encoder from earlier this year, too, so it's paid for itself five times over.

Kelly is making more changes to the house. He's just not satisfied unless he's drastically re-arranging the TV system every 6 months (new units, new service providers, new remotes...).  Now he's decided to move it to the other side of the wall, into the front room.  This involves cutting holes into the wall (the one we just had painted a few months ago after getting the ceiling repaired in the front room), re-wiring electrical stuff, crawling around in the crawl space (aka the creepy-crawly space), and generally making a mess.  I really wasn't interested in having this project done, but by the time I realized he was serious, he had already cut holes in the wall.  It hardly seemed the time to complain.  We'll see how this goes.

I, on the other hand, am tired of carpet bugs (which seem to come in waves every few months as the gross creatures hatch) and I have decided to make the investment in the house and get rid of all the carpet.  We went to look at hardwood samples and are trying to determine if we should try to do it ourselves (we have the tools, so that part's take care of) or if we should hire it out.  Or rather, if we can afford to hire it out.  We'll have to hire out some of it, like the stairs, but I think we can do the rest of it ourselves with a little bit of practice.  I figured I'd start with my closet, which doesn't connect to any other room but the bathroom (and we're keeping the vinyl for now--we'll probably upgrade to tile eventually, but it ain't broke, so...).  If it looks HORRIBLE and I don't have the confidence to do it, I'll hire it out.  It's a good place to start, I think.  First, however, we'll need to gut the house--sifting through closets and drawers, pitching old clothes, organizing and hanging and boxing (into Rubbermaid toters), and then moving furniture into the garage (after gutting the garage, too) or working around furniture to get it done.  It's gonna be a big project, and it may take weeks to get done, especially if we do it ourselves.  I'm leaning toward hiring the guys to do it, especially for downstairs, but we can't drop $8000 on flooring (yes, this is for the whole house at about $4 sq/ft for red oak with the 100 year warranty) and then having to pay the guys another $8000 to install.  We may have to do it room by room.

And the pocketbook takes another hit

Well, it wouldn't be a birthday week if at least two major things didn't break.  First the stove...which we have ordered a replacement electric stove due to cost...it would have cost us an additional $1,000 for a gas stove, gas line install, and 110 electrical outlet, so we decided to go with the electric.  In addition, the electric stoves had better ratings on Consumer Reports.  

Then yesterday, after picking up the kids, I drove about three blocks from the school and the power steering went out.  I didn't know what went wrong, but figured that driving any distance--even just to the dealership--was too far and probably asking for trouble.  I called Kelly several times although I'm not sure why he didn't hear the phone ringing.  I tried calling home, calling his work desk, and apparently he was driving home and didn't hear the phone.  So, I called Renee, who was still at the school, and she took Emma home.  Her husband, Tom, came and picked up the other two kids and took them home.  Just before he arrived, I was finally able to get ahold of Kelly.  He agreed to meet me and while he was in transit, I called the insurance company who ordered a tow truck.  The tow truck arrived just after 4:30.  

The verdict came in--it was a serpentine belt and tensioner that went out, and driving it any distance would, indeed, have been bad for the car.  I'm glad I made the decision not to drive it.  It was finished just under 24 hours later, so I have it back now, but the car is still making groaning noises.  Not sure if it's the brakes or what.  Just what I need.

Working on Lauri's quilt--a rather large round robin style with suns in the corners--and I got two new baby quilts to work on after this, and finished the Anglo-Saxon #8 weaving project.  It was a bit of a pain to get that last few feet done with the twisting and running out of ways to let out the tension, so I resorted to anchoring the weave onto various parts of the loom.  I had to get creative.  I have more ideas on how to make this work better....but I'll have to save that for another time.

<-- Front end of loom <--and the back end

My Cabbages!

We had a little...incident...in the kitchen.

I was cooking our Irish dinner--got the corned beef on and had it simmering for a couple hours and got all the potatoes cut up and ready to go.  Then it was time for the cabbage.  Thinking I could knock out the butt end by whacking it on the counter, I gave it a go...but knocked it on the glass surface instead of the counter.  Ooops.  

Thinking this was a quick and easy fix, I looked around to get a replacement glass, but like so many things, it costs almost as much to fix the thing as it is to replace it with a brand new one.  That's right--the glass costs $900.  A new stove costs $900-1200.  WHY?  I don't get it.  Granted, the stove is almost 15 years old, but you wouldn't think that the piece of glass would cost as much as a new unit.

Sadly, this means that the floors are going to be put off for a while again.  Sigh.

When we were living in a rental house up North, we had a gas stove.  We loved it!  We bought our first home...electric.  Second home...electric.  Third home...electric.  It's been something we've wanted to get back to since then, but we haven't had a chance (or the money).  Not that we have the money but we're going to have to get a new stove.  Now I gotta figure out how to get a gas line installed...maybe I need to go to Lowe's and see if they have a contractor that can come in and take care of things fairly quickly.  I don't know how long I can work without a fully functioning stove.  I have a guy coming tomorrow to give us a quote for the gas line...estimated $500-700.

Then the stove itself...I'm thinking of something like this:

It's got a double oven without taking up more space, so you can cook fish sticks AND french fries!  Turkey AND pie!  Double-speed on cookies!  And really, the price is only a couple hundred bucks more than the standard oven, and a lot less than many of the stoves out there.

I was wondering about this--do I want it?  Do I need a second oven?  Then I got to talking with my friend, author KateMarie Collins (heck yeah, I name-dropped!), and she said she LOVES hers and wouldn't trade it for anything...at least as long as she has kids.  SOLD!

And now I have to figure out what I'm going to make for dinner.  I think I may have to do some crock-pot cooking for a bit.  Boo.  Not that I hate crock-potting, but I'm not very good at it.  Overcooked, undercooked, dry, bland...sad.

Cookie Day and More Weaving

I didn't get to Omi's today.  I delivered some cookies to a customer first thing this morning and ended up chatting with her for quite a while.  She's very nice, but seems to be in the midst of boyfriend chaos and needs to unload him.  When I left, he was arriving with a small bunch of flowers.  Oh dear...time to go!  I needed a cuppa, so I pulled into the Starbucks and while I was getting my drink, the handyman called and said he was running late due to an emergency at one of the apartment complexes he works for.  I got home and once again, I waited around for the handyman to show up for several hours.  Kelly got home just after 2:00 and I ran off to get the little kids from school as well as one of the Girl Scouts who was scheduled to sell cookies with Cammie today.  We got back to the house, grabbed the last few things for the cookie sale, and I got the call from the handyman that he wasn't going to make it after all.  He'll be here tomorrow all day to finish the tiling, which he got about half-finished yesterday.  it's looking really good so far, and he estimated that we'd have the bathroom back this weekend.  Maybe Monday...



So we got to the store to set up, and started by going in to talk to the manager and gifted him a box of cookies.  He already had a set of girls out there selling (their shift was scheduled to end at 4:00, when our shift started), and was really surprised and delighted by getting a box of cookies!  He laughed and said that since there were witnesses (other employees) he supposed he'd have to share them...and he did!  Another employee came out and said he had a couple.  Cool!  The girls danced and hawked their wares, and ended up selling 60 boxes in 2 hours. Pretty awesome!  14 of them were gifts to our soldiers and their families.  We gave little thank you slips from us to most of the buyers.  We did have one woman who was vocal about not supporting the Girl Scouts, although she DOES support Boy Scouts. OK, thanks for sharing your political views.

Aside from cookies and home improvements, I got thrown back into weaving again.  Over the last day or two, another tablet weaver asked about a pattern she was experimenting with.  She's new to the weaving gig, and she's already jumped into the intermediate and advanced pieces.  I like her gumption!  She's doing great work and enjoying it!  So she asked me to look at a pattern on Guntram's Tablet Weaving Thingy (that's the actual name of it) and see what's going on.  She said hers "looked funny".  So I quickly warped up a couple yards (not the full length) of the weaving pattern and gave it a go.

Well, first I had to figure out how to get the darn program to work.  It has a really unusual file type, so I had to download the program, then monkey with the guts of my computer for a while to find the program and get the computer to recognize the files and open them.  That took another 45 minutes of my time.  Once I got it to open the files, it worked like a dream.  They have lots of cool patterns and somehow you can create your own patterns on the Tablet Weaving Thingy.

Like many of the other Anglo-Saxon weaves, you have to separate the odd and even numbered cards and turn them alternately between shuttle throws.  I followed the directions turning the odd pack first, throwing the shuttle, then turning the even pack.  Repeat a few times.  First problem, that first card wasn't weaving in properly; the shuttle was missing it entirely.  I unwove back to the start and decided to make card #1 part of the even pack instead of the odd pack--just make it another card 2, as it were.  That solved that problem--no more stringy bits hanging off the left side.  However, turning the odd cards first before the even ones still made the pattern look odd.  Certainly not like the picture.  I stared at it, scratched my head, unwove it, re-wove it backwards, unwove it again...then started looking at the white designs in the pattern.  They're supposed to be diamonds, but it was weaving up out of order.  It struck me that maybe the directions were wrong...maybe the even numbered cards should be turned first...

I gave it a try after having woven a few passes starting with the odd pack.  As you can see, the first centimeter or two "look funny", then the next few repeats are a fun twisted diamond pattern.  I sent my findings to Debbie, so hopefully this is the same issue she was having and it will be corrected on her weave as well.  I love being able to help out someone else with their weaving.  I'm not the expert...not even close...but I love a good puzzle.

The other great thing about these Anglo-Saxon patterns is that they are double-sided.  The front and back look the same!  This is what the front and back of this piece look like.  Very cool!  I'm not sure if I like this color layout...I think I might try this again but reversing the green and white for higher contrast.

Weekly Update

It's amazing how this blog has almost turned into a weekly update of what I'm doing and where I'm going.  Let's see...last week was really crazy.  Everything happened.  Tuesday was three hours of dentistry where we took Emma to the ortho, got her wires off; took everyone to the dentist for routine cleaning and Emma had her broken tooth worked on a bit more; then back to the ortho to get the wires put back on.  There was only about an hour left in the school day, so I opted to take them home instead, and then take Cammie back for a Girl Scout meeting.  Wednesday was the usual early release and karate.  Friday was CF clinic for Ben, Cookie Rally, and driving to Portland.  Ben's lung function tests were pretty much off-the-charts good, so we have to keep up the therapies and hope that he maintains that good health.

Girl Scouts Cookie Rally was that evening--it was nice that they held it on Friday so we didn't have to worry about going to bed late and being tired the next day.  We partnered up with another troop that ran two booths and our combined troops ran three more booths for money management, poster making and cookie tasting.  A few of them got the chance to put on the cookie costumes and entertain the younger Brownies and Daisies.  They did great!  They even did the flag ceremony and rocked it!  I'm so proud of all these young ladies...despite how goofy the can be...

Right after the Cookie Rally ended, I hopped in the car and drove to Portland for 12th Night.  I thought it was going to take four hours, but given the lack of traffic and higher speeds I was able to shave 45 minutes off that time, arriving at Sharon & Jeff's at 12:15.  We sat and chatted and went to bed around 1:00.  We knew we had to be up and off to the site fairly early to sign in at gate and they needed to be at a 9:00 meeting.  I wasn't welcome at this meeting (for Peers only...I'm not there yet), so I went to the merchants area and looked at the goods.  While I found a few things I liked, there wasn't anything I needed.  I knew I needed to get some linen for upcoming projects, but I also knew I could get a better price online or from Fabric Depot on sale.  I ended up spending most of that hour chatting with new author, KateMarie Collins, a longtime friend of mine.  It was great catching up with her and sharing stories about kids and daily life.  She shared a recipe with me that I'm going to have to try...it's a tortilla soup, although I may modify a few minor things--there's a lot of "can of this" and "can of that".  I'd probably try to put in fresh tomatoes instead of canned.  It sounds delicious, though!

The rest of the event was great, although I didn't get any photos of anything.  I was sitting in a place that didn't afford a good view of a lot of the court proceedings--the Royals, the awards, the swearing ceremonies, the elevation of Laurels and Pelicans, a Knighting, and the Coronation itself.  (I borrowed this photo from Lisa Kelly...hope she doesn't mind since I did a little name-dropping there.)  The new King & Queen have decided to do a German Kampfrau thing this reign.  Funny thing is I was thinking about making some German Kampfrau...but now I don't want to look like a camp follower by copying them.  Maybe I'll stick with the Turkish stuff for a bit longer.

The knights swear fealty with their swords.  It's gotta be a rather unsettling feeling to have all those sharp things pointed at you...I guess it's a trust thing.

I had dinner with Ariel and her girlfriend, Sarah.  I showed her my binder of Costumer's Guild entries, which I was unable to present for the rank challenge; there was no official guild business done at the event.  Not sure exactly why, but I was told that nothing was organized or that the challenge officer had stepped down and wasn't replaced...in any case, there was nothing going on.  I left all the clothing pieces back at the house (where I was staying...not my house) and just carried the 1/2" binder around with me.  It was small enough that it wasn't a burden.  I was able to share it with a few people who were really happy to see it, especially when they got to the last page and the HOT SOCKS!  At least, that's what Duchess Hludwige called it when Mistress Isolde jabbed her and showed her the photo. Ariel was impressed, too!

We got back to the house at about 11:00 and settled down fairly quickly.  It was a long day.  The next morning, we had breakfast--it was supposed to be a breakfast meeting, but no one showed up for it.  Afterwards, Jeff was thinking about taking the dog out for a run, and I suggested that we go visit Fabric Depot.  Sharon eagerly agreed and off we went!  We found a couple pieces of linen for my Scholar project.  Now that I finished the Journeyman stuff, even though I will have to tweak the entries a bit and be ready to present it at Ursulmas (if it gets organized), I decided to start making Kelly a full set of Scandinavian clothes for him to wear.  I might base them all on the Greenland finds, which should be fun.  I have to teach and write a bunch and do about 20 hours of service to the guild...so it'll be a year-long project, I figure.

On the way back from the fabric store, we stopped in for a visit with Mike & Laura and baby Malcolm, and to deliver a special quilt for him, pictured on the bed behind this glowing couple.  I'm so excited!  He's due any day now, so I'm anxious to get news of the delivery.  It was a short visit, but Mike gave us a tour of the house and all the rooms and hallway they've finished up, the progress on the bathroom in the Garage Mahal, and the studio and music rooms upstairs.  It really looks like a comfortable home, and they're pretty much ready for baby!

I took Sharon back to her place, packed up the last of my things and made a deal with her to buy 11 yards of her linen at the price she paid for it--$4 a yard!  Two pieces are 5 yards each, and one is a 1-yard chunk.  She also gave me links to a couple of really great sites where you can get killer deals on linen in different weights.  One of the sites sells 1-2 yard pieces of bolt-ends, so I may be able to get some really great deals on end bits to make costumes.  This works out really well when making tunics--one yard for the front, one yard in the back, one yard for the sleeves...if you're using different dye lots, it doesn't matter so much...it's medieval!  The Bocksten man tunic had different color sleeves than the body of the tunic.  White is even better...no dye lots to match!

A few weeks ago, I ordered a Geomate Jr. to use for geocaching, and I took it out for a test seek.  Unfortunately it was too dark to find it and I didn't have a flashlight, but at least I know that one cache is going to be easy to find!  I thought I'd try to look for a few more today, but I ended up waiting over two hours for a new customer to come by with a quilt top.  It's a lovely fall-colored queen-size.  She wants a simple stipple all over it, which I will be able to finish up pretty quickly.  Tomorrow's weather is supposed to be equally nice, so maybe I'll go for a walk.

I pulled the loom out of the garage and wove a couple of feet of cardweaving yesterday.  It felt so good to work with the strings again!  I want to weave a couple more pieces before the event in 10 days, where I can sell them on commission with Gypsy Caravan and hopefully pay for my gas and weekends...and a bunch of linen I just purchased...  This is one of the weaving pieces that I started some time back and I'm debating whether or not to sell this one.  It was meant to be something for me, but I may go ahead and set it out for sale.  If it doesn't sell, it was meant for me.  If it does, I can always make another one.  Eh...I'll sell it.  I'd like to make one or two more to add to the four or five I have already.

Oh, and yesterday we had a handyman come out to give us a couple of quotes on work we need to have done.  The kids' bathroom needs to have the floor fixed...and we may have some mold under the floor after the flooding.  Kelly took him around and showed him some other things we'd like to get done over time, and while they were talking out front, he noticed that there were signs of water damage under the siding.  I think some of the weatherproofing might have failed on the sunny side of the house...ugh.  Hopefully it will turn out to be minor and inexpensive...but you know it never is.  I'm hoping to get hardwood floors this year and tear up all this worn out carpet.  It's 15 year old carpet that is really only meant to last five years.  Maybe I'll have to seriously consider getting a part-time job just to pay for home improvement and repairs.  I'm barely organized enough as it is...not sure how I'll manage that.

However, having people coming by today got me motivated to clean up a bunch.  I still have to clear off a table and the island, and I'd like to box up a bunch of stuff to take to GoodWill.  Maybe later this week.

House Wish List

When we first looked at this house, we knew that it was nearly perfect.  No house really is *perfect*, but it was as close as we were going to get without building it ourselves.  It had enough bedrooms, bathrooms, and closet space, and the bonus space I needed for my sewing room and an extra bay in the garage for Kelly's shop.  It was also in a great neighborhood, had a yard large enough for our needs (no dog and no real intention of gardening, but enough backyard for the kids to play), and not on a busy street or under power lines.  It was also a short drive to Kelly's workplace and didn't require him to get on the interstate to get there.  There were few things it didn't have from our checklist when house hunting.  We were happy enough to have found such a place that was immediately available, even though it was at the top of our budget.  We haven't done much to personalize it since moving in--the carpets, wall colors, and even the window coverings are all what was there when we moved in.  The only major changes we've made is replacing a couple of windows in Emma's room and the countertops in the kitchen.  We have lots of great plans for the house, none of which we can really afford at this time.  Here's a few things I'd like to do.

1.  Front staircase:

This is the way it looks now.  And yes, I cleaned up a bit around it to make it photo-ready.  You should see the pile of ill-fitting shoes that need to be donated that are just out of view.  Nothing like photographing your house to clean up one corner at a time.  I always liked that the opening of the staircase wasn't pointing directly at the front door (I think there's a fung shui thing about this).  However, what we have just seems sort of...plain.  I knew it could be easily gussied up with the right design.  

This is what I found.  I took one look at this and said, WOW!  This would look so nice and really give our "Craftsman Style" house a much more period feel.  Yeah, our house was built in the late 90s, but it's listed as a "Craftsman Style" in the description of the property--probably why I liked it so much was that the layout was so comfortable like an old Craftsman house.  I love the pillars with all the detailing and the lovely natural wood.  The paint on our railings are chipping and peeling so eventually I will have to touch it up or replace it.  I also love the door on this side of the stairs for storage.  Not sure if it's worth moving the doorway from the dining room to the front room--of course, we have bookcases in front of that area now anyway.  

2.  Hardwood floors:

Of course, we will be including hardwood floors throughout, upstairs & down, and on the stairs--the carpet is the same age as the house, and from what I understand, carpet generally lasts about five years and we're up beyond 12 now.  I've been scoping out flooring options online, wondering if I could do it myself or if I should hire it out.  I estimate that it's going to cost upwards of $5000 to get it done using some inexpensive hardwood (not laminate), and that includes upstairs and down.  With the lung issues that my kids are having, the more we can do to reduce allergens, the better.

3.  Kids' Bathroom:

The kids' bathroom has had some flooding issues.  The bathtub was filled to the brim and then they played Storm at Sea and saturated the floor.  The water swelled the caulking from previous storms, so it leaked down into the floor, into the space below and started pouring out the dining room below, setting off the smoke detector.  The drywall on the ceiling below is damaged as is all the cardboard-like trim around the edges of the bathroom.  We would like to put in heated tile floors and trim to avoid future floods and make it as comfortable as possible for the little tootsies that touch the floor.

We'd also like to put a window in that bathroom--something really small--just enough to open to let some steam out.  The bathroom fan is not working very well--I don't know if there's a blockage, or if the fan isn't strong enough for the space, or if it's just broken, but it's not sucking the steam out after the long, hot showers.  A window that can open would certainly help a lot, but we also need to replace the fan.

4.  Downstairs bathroom:

Due to some minor flooding (toilet overflowing) and not being aware of it for some time (child closed the door and failed to mention it to me), the wood floors warped.  I'd like to replace this with tile as well.

5.  Fireplace:

Our fireplace is a little odd--it's in the corner of the room.  Not sure why they decided to do this in the design, and it's not something you can easily fix without re-routing all the vents and things, so I guess we'll have to take this weird design choice and run with it.  The surround looks very similar to this one, except mine is painted white, of course, and they put large white tiles around it instead of these smaller, more colorful ones.  I love this look, especially with the natural wood.  I'd love to update (or back-date?) my fireplace with this type of tile and the lovely blue and orange slate ones on the floor.  It's a gas fireplace, so there's not any worry about making it fire-proof or worry about sparks hitting the floor, but if we're making changes to the floors anyway...


6.  Laundry room:

Right now we don't have a room, so much, as a pass-through from the kitchen to the garage.  There's no place to store baskets of laundry as you process them from dirty to clean, no folding table, and at this time, no door to close to reduce noise.  The door was taken off the hinges to get our dining room table into the house as we moved in, and we realized that putting the door back would get in the way of anyone trying to DO laundry.  I can just see me now, shoving clothes into the washer and someone comes bursting through the door and pinches my hand in the washer.  We just left the door off, but I'd love to put in a pocket door here to cut down on the noise.

The bigger plan is to knock out the wall behind it and build a 10 x 15 (or larger) addition to make a real laundry ROOM.  Something with a folding table, cupboards, utility sink, ironing board--the works.  Kelly drew up the idea on SketchUp and even put in an attached, external shed for garden tools, and a crawl space access.  This is a biggie, so it's not likely going to happen, but if we win a small lottery, it's going in!

7.  Back porch:

The wood on the back porch is rotting and needs to be replaced.  We'd like to change the layout of the porch a little bit to make it easier to go out to the patio from the back door.  maybe something a bit wider and deeper, or maybe without railings--just steps going down in different directions to get to the water spigot, the swings, and the patio.  I'd also like to get some new doors on the back.  The slider doors are narrow and clunky, and the locking mechanism is fussy--you have to close it just right to get it to lock correctly.  I worry that eventually it's going to be insecure or that someone isn't going to lock it right and we'll have intruders...vampires or bigfoot or something.

8.  Front porch:

There's nothing really wrong with the front porch, but it's rather narrow and doesn't get used.  I'm wondering if there's some way to open it up a little to make it deeper, more welcoming, and make use of the space.  Soft cushions would help, but given our weather changes, I'm not sure what I'd do with them in the "off season".  Bag 'em up and put them in the garage?

The bushes out front are also pretty overgrown and need to be trimmed back.  I hate to kill perfectly good bushes, but if they're too big and still growing, I will need to get something that won't grow quite so tall.  Short shrubs.  There's a really big hydrangea at the end of the porch, rather than a rail and spindle barricade, to keep people from wandering through and maintains privacy for someone sitting and having a cuppa, but the bushes in the front make it almost like a fortress.

I'd also like to get the front door replaced with a door that has windows on it.  For security purposes, I'd like to be able to see who is at the door before unlocking it.  We have a peep hole, but like so many of them, it's placed so high up that I'd need a step stool to look out.

9.  Woodwork details:

Back inside the house, I'd like to replace all the crappy wood trim (that's actually some kind of fiber board that wrinkles when it gets wet, as you can see in the bathroom photo), and add ceiling boxes, wainscotting, and picture rails.  Simple little additions can add so much richness to the space.

10.  Appliances:

OK, so we got a new dishwasher a couple years ago, settling on white to match the existing appliances, and within a few short weeks, one of the kids fell on the door (while it was open, of course) and broke it.  It's still *on* and it still closes and works, but it requires a bit more brute force to close it and if you open the door a crack, it falls all the way open.  So you can't just open it a crack to allow the steam to escape, you have to let it open all the way and then walk around the door until the dishes are cooled down enough to handle them.  I asked about getting it repaired, and the guy at the store said that we'd have to replace the entire door, which costs almost as much as the dishwasher itself.  Figures.  The original microwave died, so we replaced that with a stainless microwave, thinking that we'd replace all the appliances with stainless as they died, so it doesn't match the other appliances--and of course, we thought, "why didn't we think about making the dishwasher stainless when we replaced that?"  The new microwave also acting up--it quits in the middle of cooking things, for no apparent reason.  Not sure what that's about.  Then Kelly picked up a small fridge for our milk and medicine since we never seem to have enough room in our regular fridge for food and medicine, especially when you're getting 90 days of medication for two kids and getting 4 to 6 gallons of milk at a time.  I didn't go with him to pick it out, and I was picturing something more like a wine fridge, but it arrived back at the house--black.  So now we have black appliances, white appliances, and stainless.  I hate the fridge--it's too narrow.  The oven is electric.  I'd love to be able to replace all of them with matching appliances and install gas in the kitchen.

So there it is.  The top ten stuff I'd do to my house if I had a lottery winner.  #11 would have been to put in fancy shelves in my sewing room.  I had looked at some ideas at IKEA and they had the Billy bookcases that might work well.  Again, more stuff I have to dream about.